Unsustainable River Management Will Prevent the Achievement of the SDGs

Abstract

River ecosystems sustain socio-economic development via the provision of essential ecosystem services, which are of direct relevance to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A paradigm shift in river management over the last 30 years, away from engineered channels that predominantly increase drainage efficiency, towards more restorative and holistic approaches that integrate hydrological, geomorphological, and ecological systems, makes this an ideal time to reflect on both the successes and future trajectories in river ecosystem management. Therefore, we synthesize published research on river ecosystems within the SDG framework using a suite of knowledge visualization tools. Co-occurrence analysis reveals that research in river ecosystem science can be broadly split into three themes: water quality, water flow, and aquatic organisms, and that most published work spans more than one of these themes. Co-word network evolution reveals a significant increase over the past decade in research on climate change, emerging pollutants, and the dynamics of riparian communities. Regions with different levels of socio-economic development exhibit markedly different research priorities. Correlation analysis between article keywords and the SDGs reveals synergies and trade-offs between river ecosystems and the achievement of 130 of the targets. Under the SDGs framework, these findings highlight frontier research priorities and provide a knowledge base to support the sustainable management of river ecosystems in the face of future challenges.

Keywords

River ecosystem / Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) / River management / Knowledge visualization / Ecosystem services

Supplementary Materials

The following supporting information can be found at: https://www.sciepublish.com/article/pii/1053, Text S1: Classification criteria for subject keywords; Figure S1: Contribution of river ecosystems to SDGs. River ecosystem services were found to directly and indirectly contribute to 68 of the 169 SDG targets. A small circle represents an SDG target, with grey indicating that the river does not contribute to that SDG target, green indicating a direct contribution of river ecosystems to that target, and yellow indicating an indirect link; Table S1: Keywords related to the theme found in the study of river ecosystems. These keywords were then used to construct Boolean search queries, which were applied to the Web of Science database to retrieve relevant literature; Table S2: Synergies and trade-offs between river ecosystems and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The table presents detailed information for each target. Keywords shown in bold were used to retrieve content related to river ecosystems and to establish linkages between the targets and river ecosystems. The table further summarizes these linkages, the reasoning, and the corresponding references.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tenna Riis for comments on the early version of the manuscript. Acknowledge Ruo-wen Wu and Qian-ling-lin Qiu for their invaluable insights on co-word analysis.

Author Contributions

W.-L.Z. performed the data collection and drafted the first version of the paper. Y.-Y.X., M.F.J., F.K.S.C., N.-C.W. and C.C. provided numerous modifications to the structure and content of the paper, Z.-F.G. and T.L. contributed significantly to the graphical and analytical aspects of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the results and to the writing and editing of the manuscript.

Ethics Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

All data used in this study were obtained from the Web of Science database. Additional data processing details are available upon request from the authors.

Funding

This study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China with the National Key Research and Development Program (NO: 2025YFE0111305) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) with Young Scientists Programs (No: 42307066; 32301334).

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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