WATER POLLUTION AND AGRICULTURE: MULTI-POLLUTANT PERSPECTIVES

Highlights

● Four highlights are identified for agriculture and water from the multi-pollutant perspective.

● Large variations in time and space for multiple pollutants in waters and their sources.

● Scientific agenda should account for multiple pollutants in agricultural strategies.

Abstract

Agriculture is an important cause of multiple pollutants in water. With population growth and increasing food demand, more nutrients, plastics, pesticides, pathogens and antibiotics are expected to enter water systems in the 21st century. As a result, water science has been shifting from single-pollutant to multi-pollutant perspectives for large-scale water quality assessments. This perspective paper summarizes and discusses four main highlights related to water pollution and agriculture from the multi-pollutant perspective. These highlights reveal the spatial and temporal distribution and main sources of multiple pollutants in waters. Based on the highlights, a scientific agenda is proposed to prioritize solutions for sustainable agriculture (UN Sustainable Development Goal 2) and clean water (UN Sustainable Development Goals 6 and 14). This agenda points out that when formulating solutions for water pollution, it is essential to take into account multiple pollutants and their interactions beyond biogeochemistry.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

water quality / agriculture / multi-pollutant assessment / hotspots / interactions

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the support of the KNAW-MOST project, “Sustainable Resource Management for Adequate and Safe Food Provision (SURE+)” (PSA-SA-E-01, supporting M. Wang). We also acknowledge the Dutch Talent Program Veni-NWO project (0.16.Veni.198.001, supporting M. Strokal). Q. Zhang and Y. Li were supported by China Scholarship Council (201913043) and Hainan University. A. Ural-Janssen was supported by the FertiCycle project from the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 860127. M. P. Bak was supported by Wageningen Institute for Environment and Climate Research (WIMEK) scholarship project No. 5160958452. I. Micella was supported by the inventWater project from the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 956623.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Mengru Wang, Qi Zhang, Yanan Li, Mirjam P. Bak, Sijie Feng, Carolien Kroeze, Fanlei Meng, Ilaria Micella, Vita Strokal, Aslıhan Ural-Janssen, and Maryna Strokal declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2023. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)