Source-to-Sea Management

This book is the first of its kind on the emerging topic of source-to-sea management. It showcases different applications of the concept to improve the environmental health of freshwater, land, and coastal and marine systems, drawing upon research performed across Europe, Africa and Asia. Improved management of land, freshwater, coasts and oceans is a key environmental challenge of our time.

It is needed to prevent the millions of tons of plastic and other pollutants that enter the ocean from land-based sources each year. It is essential to reduce highly-polluted, oxygen-depleted "dead zones" in our coastal and marine waters. Extensive diversions of the flows of rivers need to be avoided to prevent that little or no water reaches the sea.

Source-to-sea (S2S) is an emerging concept to improve understanding of how to effectively manage freshwater, land, coastal and marine systems. The collected works in this book explore experiences with S2S management in diverse regions across Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, addressing sedimentation, nutrient and pharmaceutical pollution in freshwater and marine aquatic environments, and marine debris on the coasts and seas. It provides key insights into a few areas that should be of interest to those who want to learn from the lessons from case studies of applied S2S interventions.

This book will be of great value to scholars, students, and researchers interested in global freshwater, coastal zone, and ocean management, sustainable development and environmental governance. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Water International.