Sub-Saharan Africa will increasingly become the dominant hotspot of surface water pollution
Human activities greatly impact surface water quality, while being reliant upon it for water supply. Surface water quality is expected to change in the future as a result of alterations to pollutant loadings, surface water withdrawals and hydrological regimes, driven by both climate change and socio-economic developments. Here we use a high-resolution global surface water quality model to project water temperature and indicators of salinity (total dissolved solids), organic (biological oxygen demand) and pathogen (fecal coliform) pollution until 2100. The results show that while surface water ...