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Compound Climate Extremes: Interactions, Emerging Urban Stressors, and Impacts on Water Quality
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When droughts, heatwaves, and floods hit one after another or all at once, they don't just add up, they team up to make water pollution worse, stirring up heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and microplastics from soil and infrastructure into our drinking water sources. This review pulls together existing research to show that cities make things worse by trapping heat and altering how water flows, and that our current warning systems and models aren't keeping pace with these compounding threats. The takeaway: as climate change makes these overlapping extreme weather events more common, protecting safe water access will require smarter planning that accounts for multiple hazards hitting at once.
This review examines the interactions and cascading impacts of compound climate extremes, such as concurrent droughts, heatwaves, and floods, under climate change. It highlights their growing yet often overlooked threats to water quality, food security, and ecosystem resilience, and emphasizes their systemic implications for coupled human–environment systems. Recent literature reveals that compound extremes such as concurrent droughts, floods, and heatwaves generate amplified and disproportionate impacts due to their interdependent dynamics. Urbanization intensifies these effects by disrupting hydrological processes and enhancing thermal retention through mechanisms like the urban heat island effect. Despite growing recognition of their complexity, most predictive models remain limited by inadequate feedback integration, insufficient spatiotemporal resolution, and uneven regional adaptation capacities. This review highlights mounting evidence that compound extremes significantly degrade water quality by mobilizing both geogenic and emerging contaminants such as heavy metals, nutrients, pharmaceuticals, and microplastics under shifting flow, temperature, and redox conditions. While quantile-based thresholds and hazard overlays are commonly used for characterizing these events, gaps remain in linking compound hazard typologies with contaminant pathways and water system responses across diverse climatic and infrastructural contexts. This review synthesizes global literature on compound climate extremes to identify event patterns, vulnerabilities, and modeling gaps. It underscores the need for integrated planning, early warning systems, and adaptive governance to manage escalating multi-hazard risks. Particular focus is placed on emerging contaminant mobilization, urban stressors, and scalable resilience strategies, offering actionable insights for climate-informed decision-making.
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Microplastics and Emerging Contaminants Under Climate Change and Extreme Hydrological Events: A Nexus Perspective for Environmental Sustainability
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This review paper looks at how climate change, things like floods, droughts, and heatwaves, can make microplastic pollution and other harmful chemicals in our water and soil worse by helping them spread further and interact in unpredictable ways. That matters because these tiny plastic particles can carry toxic chemicals into our drinking water and food supply, and extreme weather (which is becoming more common) may make this problem harder to control. The researchers suggest solutions like better wastewater treatment and safer plastic alternatives, but emphasize that tackling climate change and plastic pollution together, rather than separately, is key to protecting public health.
Water Pollution and Human Health: An Integrated Risk Perspective
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This review of over 330 studies pulls together what scientists know about how pollutants like heavy metals, pesticides, drug residues, microplastics, and harmful bacteria get into our water and eventually into our bodies. The big takeaway: we still don't fully understand what happens when multiple pollutants combine in our water supply, and this mix of contaminants could be more harmful together than any single one alone. Bottom line—stronger water treatment and regulations are needed to close this research gap and better protect public health.
Co-exposure of environmental contaminants with unfavorable temperature or humidity/moisture: Joint hazards and underlying mechanisms
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This review examines how extreme temperatures and changes in humidity or soil moisture interact with environmental pollutants to create combined harmful effects on living organisms. Researchers found that both high heat and low moisture conditions can amplify the toxicity of contaminants including microplastics, heavy metals, and pesticides. The study suggests that as climate change increases the frequency of extreme weather, organisms will face escalating risks from these pollutant-climate interactions.
Water Pollution and Climate Change: Biogeochemical Linkages, Feedback Mechanisms, and the Compounding Crisis of the Anthropocene
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This review examines the bidirectional feedbacks between water pollution and climate change, showing how eutrophication, ocean acidification, and plastic pollution both respond to and amplify warming — and argues that these interlocking crises require integrated transdisciplinary responses rather than the historically siloed approaches of environmental science.
Water Pollution and Climate Change: Biogeochemical Linkages, Feedback Mechanisms, and the Compounding Crisis of the Anthropocene
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Researchers review the bidirectional feedbacks between water pollution and climate change, showing how eutrophication, ocean acidification, hypoxia, and plastic pollution both respond to and accelerate warming through disrupted carbon and nitrogen cycling, greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced ocean carbon sequestration capacity.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.