A magnetic covalent organic framework nanocomposite (Fe₃O₄@COF(Tp-NDA)) was synthesized via a solvothermal method, used as a magnetic adsorbent for the extraction of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from lake water, tea, coffee, and fried chicken, and detected using a high performance liquid chromatography-ultraviolet detector. The synthesized magnetic adsorbent was characterized via transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, N₂ adsorption–desorption isotherm analysis and vibrating sample magnetometry. Parameters that affected the extraction conditions and desorption conditions were optimized. Adsorption equilibrium could be attained within 3 min. The prepared magnetic material could be reused 10 times. The limits of detection and quantification were 0.05–0.25 μg L⁻¹ and 0.17–0.83 μg L⁻¹, respectively. The recovery was 74.6–101.8% with a relative standard deviation of below 4.2%. The method was successfully used to detect PAHs in various samples.

The Ecosystem Restoration Project (ERP) is a critical and urgent practice to achieve the land degradation neutrality (LDN) targets. However, an insufficient understanding of the balance between contrasting sectors of the food-water-ecosystem nexus results in ineffectiveness in supporting complex environmental management (CEM), leading to undesirable ERP failures. The Ordos Plateau case identified the nexus evolution and the non-linear interactions between sectors, which were expected to support adaptive strategy formulations for CEM and achieve win-win outcomes. Revegetation in drylands substantially boosted ecosystem restoration, alleviating soil erosion. However, the excessive reliance on returning cropland to woodland and grassland has caused a significant loss of arable and grazing land. During the initial period of ERPs, this exacerbated decline in grain and meat productivity. In addition, aggressive revegetation activities have also reduced runoff yield and depleted soil water resources. Water scarcity is recognized as the most challenging issue in dryland ecosystem restoration, heavily influencing the interactions between sectors and threatening the long-term sustainability of ERPs. To accommodate for regional water carrying capacity, ERPs should adopt and properly allocate the use of suitable plant species with a proven anti-drought capability and high survival ratios without additional human interventions. In addition, the evolution regimes, driving factors, critical thresholds, and complex feedbacks between the nexus sectors should be fully understood to address the water resources constraints and reconcile trade-offs. This would enable the prevention of ecosystem shifts to undesirable failures and inform timely and cost-effective CEM to achieve the LDN targets.

Cape Verde, which has agricultural land that is mainly rainfed, will be severely affected by climate change due to increased drought conditions. Scarce water availability makes this country highly dependent on imports for its food supply, resulting in more than 80% food importation. Improving water use efficiency, implementing precision irrigation could help achieve sustainable use of water resources. Cereal production reusing treated water could contribute to strengthening resilience and adaptation to climate change in Cape Verde. Our pilot project demonstrates that the safe and profitable reuse of water produced by Cape Verde’s water treatment plants is possible by avoiding water and plant contact using Subsurface Drip Irrigation (SDI), obtaining food yields between 10,000 and 7000 kg of cob/ha, with a water consumption of about 300 L/kg Dry-Matter and a Water-Use-Efficiency of about 3 g/L. These studies also showed that it is necessary to provide training to farmers and to conduct further studies to help solve present challenges. This project identif installation failures as water shortages can compromise farmers’ profitability. To guarantee the sustainability of water reuse, it is also necessary to consider economic and social factors, including that all water that is not reused is poured, increasing environmental and sanitary risk and decreasing the possibility of recovering water treatment costs.

Food and beverages enrichment with water-insoluble health-promoting nutraceuticals is important, but technologically challenging. Sugar beet pectin (SBP) is a natural dietary fiber with high emulsifying capacity. However, its potential as a natural encapsulator of hydrophobic nutraceuticals for beverage enrichment, has hardly been explored. Curcumin is a potent antioxidant with numerous attributed health benefits, but very low aqueous-solubility. We herein explored SBP as a carrier for solubilization and protection of curcumin (CUR). Using spectrofluorimetry, the CUR-SBP binding constant determined was (6.74 ± 0.5) ∙ 10⁵M⁻¹. As CUR:SBP molar ratio increased from 14:1 to 140:1, CUR encapsulation capacity increased from 14.5 ± 0.8 to 127.4 ± 0.4 mg CUR/gSBP, and encapsulation efficiency moderately decreased from ~100% to 86 ± 7%. The encapsulation in SBP dramatically decreased CUR particle size, from >17 μm to <0.5 μm, in average, and conferred substantial protection to CUR during simulated shelf-life, decreasing the decay rate constant ~7 fold. Therefore, SBP is a potent natural encapsulator for hydrophobic nutraceuticals for food and even clear beverage enrichment.

The recent spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SAR-CoV-2) and the accompanied coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has continued ceaselessly despite the implementations of popular measures, which include social distancing and outdoor face masking as recommended by the World Health Organization. Due to the unstable nature of the virus, leading to the emergence of new variants that are claimed to be more and rapidly transmissible, there is a need for further consideration of the alternative potential pathways of the virus transmissions to provide the needed and effective control measures. This review aims to address this important issue by examining the transmission pathways of SARS-CoV-2 via indirect contacts such as fomites and aerosols, extending to water, food, and other environmental compartments. This is essentially required to shed more light regarding the speculation of the virus spread through these media as the available information regarding this is fragmented in the literature. The existing state of the information on the presence and persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in water-food-environmental compartments is essential for cause-and-effect relationships of human interactions and environmental samples to safeguard the possible transmission and associated risks through these media. Furthermore, the integration of effective remedial measures previously used to tackle the viral outbreaks and pandemics, and the development of new sustainable measures targeting at monitoring and curbing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 were emphasized. This study concluded that alternative transmission pathways via human interactions with environmental samples should not be ignored due to the evolving of more infectious and transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants.

In spite of the 30% increase in the food supply since 1961, significant changes are anticipated over the coming decades that will increase the challenges facing smallholders. Climate change, rapidly growing population and increasing pollution all add to the risks of water and food security. This is happening at a time when water resources management is shifting away from government planning and control to a more adaptive and flexible model involving more stakeholders, whereby farmers and smallholders are increasingly involved in decision‐making and governance of water resources. Many governments, however, continue to look to their smallholders to increase food production and to find ways to produce more with less. Farmers, thus, will need to find new ways of learning and rely more on their own resources, on the private sector and on support from civil society organizations and non‐governmental organizations. This paper examines the changing nature of farmer support services, focusing on the role played by emerging non‐institutional actors. As water becomes the limiting resource for food production, it is crucial to understand how food markets are growing and can incentivize smallholders to produce more, and critically, how farmers are finding new ways of acquiring the knowledge and expertise they need.

Cape Verde, which has agricultural land that is mainly rainfed, will be severely affected by climate change due to increased drought conditions. Scarce water availability makes this country highly dependent on imports for its food supply, resulting in more than 80% food importation. Improving water use efficiency, implementing precision irrigation could help achieve sustainable use of water resources. Cereal production reusing treated water could contribute to strengthening resilience and adaptation to climate change in Cape Verde. Our pilot project demonstrates that the safe and profitable reuse of water produced by Cape Verde’s water treatment plants is possible by avoiding water and plant contact using Subsurface Drip Irrigation (SDI), obtaining food yields between 10,000 and 7000 kg of cob/ha, with a water consumption of about 300 L/kg Dry-Matter and a Water-Use-Efficiency of about 3 g/L. These studies also showed that it is necessary to provide training to farmers and to conduct further studies to help solve present challenges. This project identif installation failures as water shortages can compromise farmers’ profitability. To guarantee the sustainability of water reuse, it is also necessary to consider economic and social factors, including that all water that is not reused is poured, increasing environmental and sanitary risk and decreasing the possibility of recovering water treatment costs.

The interactive dynamics in the food, water, and energy system as a nexus (FWEN) are critical to the sustainable development of global cities, and they can be mediated by green and blue infrastructure (GBI) in the urban area. Here we provide a comprehensive literature review to examine how GBI affects FWEN in urban centers, an area which is currently understudied. In order to do this, we undertake a systematic review of the literature using a meta-analytic approach and topic modelling. Based on our synthesis, we develop a conceptual framework of the key links between urban GBI and FWEN and the direction and magnitude of the relationship. We found that GBIs can benefit food supply, energy saving, and climate change mitigation but at a price of food safety and water contamination. Well-designed urban construction can help curb the negative effects. Therefore, we need to make deliberate and integrative policy to link GBI with each element in urban FWEN. Moreover, the focus of studies on GBIFWEN links is also heterogeneous across cities: urban agriculture and food security are priorities in cities located in Africa and Asia as well as in lower income and larger cities (but not metropolitan areas), while the cooling effect of green space has been a focus for cities of middle or high income. Finally, current research focuses on isolated analysis, lacking integrated studies needed for decision making supporting tools. While isolated analyses lead to connectivity failures and can result in adverse impacts, integrated analyses can identify interdependencies of environmental resources between parts of a cycle and across different scales, which can increase resource efficiency and minimize environmental degradation. Therefore, our key findings point out the importance of linking the effects of GBI on each component of FWEN in both research and policy making.

Conservation of the endangered freshwater pearl mussel (FPM) includes artificially rearing juveniles, but the pulsed flow-through (PFT) method, enabling the continuous renewal of water and food in culture containers, has not been applied to FPM. This study tested the PFT method in culture of FPM juveniles, and the effect of water source (tap vs well water) and food concentration (mixture of commercial phytoplankton products) on the survival and growth of juveniles. Beaker-specific survival rates varied from 0 to 100% (mean: 34%) and from 0 to 58% (mean: 16%) in the 1st (2-week) and 2nd (10-week) experiment, respectively. In the 1st experiment, juveniles attained statistically significantly bigger sizes and more than two times higher survival in well water than they did in tap water. In both experiments, the food concentration of 0.250 µl/l resulted in the highest survival (compared to other concentrations ranging from 0.125 to 0.500 µl/l). However, food concentration did not have a significant effect on size of juvenile FPM in either of the experiments. Results indicate that the PFT system is suitable for FPM rearing experiments, but its applicability to mass culture of FPM juveniles requires further investigation.

The increasing need to conserve resources has led to the development of several concepts, tools, and frameworks to support optimum resource management (RM) in the past few decades. However, system designers and policy makers often find it difficult to navigate the wide array of available concepts. Energy-water-food nexus (EWF nexus), circular economy (CE), and industrial ecology (IE) are discussed in terms of their conceptual development, representative tools used to conduct analysis therein, and the performance indicators deployed to measure progress and performance. Unlike previous literature that focused on one or two of the aforementioned concepts in parallel, this review assesses the three concepts together based on the RM objectives. This review considers three popular concepts that support sustainable RM in terms of potential areas for convergence and divergence. The review is conducted in four stages: (i) identifying the research objective and relevant keywords after extracting articles from well-known databases; (ii) screening articles obtained from stage (i) by removing duplicates and applying predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria; (iii) reviewing the screened articles for eligibility; and (iv) defining the final list of articles to be included in the review and analysing them. The outcomes of this review suggest that the CE and EWF nexus are more flexible in terms of application scale (i.e. micro, meso, and macro), whereas IE is applied within industrial parks. Most EWF nexus studies focus on managing interlinkages and synergies between the three resources; however, CE and IE are more likely to focus on closing material/energy loops within defined system boundaries. This review sets the premise for future work, which can help align the three guiding concepts into a combined holistic effort to manage resources depending on the problem considered, either through a single framework or a coordinated effort wherein all three concepts are deployed.