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Annual Review of Environment and Resources

Volume 49, 2024

State of the World's Rivers

  • Sheikh Tawhidul Islam1,2, Syed Hafizur Rahman3, Mir A. Matin4, Aniruddha Dey5, Byomkesh Talukder6, Nandini Sanyal7, Md. Asadujjaman8 and Kamruzzaman Akand9
  • 1Institute of Remote Sensing and GIS, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh; email: [email protected] 2Disaster Management and Climate Change Analytics in South Asia, Institute for Water, Environment and Health (INWEH), United Nations University, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada 3Department of Environmental Sciences, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh; email: [email protected] 4Institute for Water, Environment and Health (INWEH), United Nations University, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada; email: [email protected] 5Professional Institute for Development and Socio Environmental Management (PRISM), Kolkata, India; email: [email protected] 6Department of Global Health, Florida International University, University Park, Florida, USA; email: [email protected] 7Science Connect Ltd., Dhaka, Bangladesh; email: [email protected] 8Fisheries and Ocean Science, Khulna Agricultural University, Khulna, Bangladesh; email: [email protected] 9River, Delta and Coastal Morphology Division, Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), Dhaka, Bangladesh; email: [email protected]
  • Vol. 49:137-162 (Volume publication date October 2024)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on September 17, 2024
  • Copyright © 2024 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

In this review, we thoroughly analyze the state of global rivers, focusing on their physical and ecological characteristics as well as management strategies. The review results have helped us generate four recommendations. Firstly, rivers should be managed under a legally binding global accord at the basin level. Secondly, challenges related to river pollution and inappropriate project implementation can be mitigated by adopting newly defined strategic environmental assessments and the United Nations System of Environmental Economic Accounting. Thirdly, we need data from the latest scientific sources, such as geospatial sources, to better understand rivers at different scales as composite systems. The last recommendation calls for taking into account climate change concerns in river management approaches. We also outline a proposition for developing a river monitoring and assessment program in order to perform comprehensive and planet-wide river assessment. The article elaborates on the strategies for achieving these recommendations.

Keyword(s): climate change, IPCC, management of rivers, rivers, scale of rivers, status of rivers, world rivers
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-environ-111022-020951
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State of the World's Rivers
Annual Review of Environment and Resources 49, 137 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-111022-020951
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-environ-111022-020951
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-environ-111022-020951
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