Sea-level rise could affect fresh water availability

A new publication launched by leading European Ocean scientists, titled Navigating the Future VI (NFVI), highlights our lack of understanding of saltwater intrusion into coastal freshwater systems under current and future climate scenarios, and its impacts for coastal communities. How much salt water is reaching those systems? Are climate change impacts such as higher sea levels, and warmer weather leading to increased use of underground freshwater reserves, making that intrusion more likely? Written by a team of experts from the marine sciences, the Navigating the Future VI makes it clear that we can no longer consider and manage the Ocean and fresh water separately. Water resilience has already been identified as a key focus for the new European Commission college of Commissioners, and as they start their official hearings, we highlight the important role of the Ocean in ensuring it.

 
“We humans are heavily reliant on clean freshwater, but we still exert severe pressure on this crucial commodity. Global warming causes rising sea levels, which are pushing seawater further inland into rivers, wetlands and underground freshwater reserves, with negative effects on water quality. Moreover, human activities generate waste streams with cocktails of hazardous chemicals that enter the global water cycle, making their way from freshwater reservoirs to the Ocean. Freshwater and the Ocean are intimately connected and affect each other; we need to understand how in order to sustainably use both components of the global water cycle”, says Dr. Peter Kraal of NIOZ Sea Research, co-lead of the chapter on fresh water and the Ocean.

Critical questions

This publication provides governments, policymakers and funders with robust, independent scientific advice on future seas and Ocean research. The NFVI Ocean and Fresh Water chapter presents the many linkages and pathways between the Ocean and freshwater systems, and highlights the key unanswered questions:

• To what extent is salt water from the Ocean intruding into our terrestrial freshwater reserves?
• What dangerous microorganisms could climate change release into our water as we see more rainfall, and melting of ice and permafrost?
• What pathways are there for waterborne pollutants to reach the Ocean and us?
• Can some pollutants extracted from wastewater be re-used?
• How do we design policies that can deal with new emerging pollutants and new knowledge about them?

 

 

About NFVI

NFVI was written by experts from the European Marine Board, an independent non-governmental advisory body that represents more than 10,000 marine scientists across Europe. The publication focuses on the critical role the Ocean plays in the wider Earth system. The working group (operating from October 2022 – October 2024) comprises 33 experts from 16 European countries, covering a wide range of marine natural and social science backgrounds and career levels.

The document can be access at: https://www.marineboard.eu/publications/nfvi

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