Water Security in a Changing Climate: Integrating Water Footprint, Land Use, and Water Quality from Local to Regional Scales

The pressures on water systems are multifaceted and interdependent, driven by a combination of climate variability, land use change, agricultural intensification, and urban expansion. Water footprints have emerged as a critical indicator to quantify consumptive water use, while water quality monitoring and modeling reveal the extent of pollution threats to both human and ecosystem health. Together, these elements provide an essential lens for understanding water security in a holistic way. Recent advances in geospatial analysis, hydrologic modeling, and integrated assessment methods offer new opportunities to address these challenges and evaluate trade-offs between water use, economic development, and environmental protection.Water security is becoming an increasingly urgent issue as climate change, population growth, and intensifying land use continue to alter hydrologic regimes worldwide. The interplay between water footprint, water quality, and competing demands from agriculture, urban areas, and ecosystems presents significant challenges for sustainable water management. This Research Topic aims to explore how integrative, science-based approaches can advance our understanding of these challenges and inform effective water resource policies. Its distinctive contribution lies in the explicit triple integration of water footprint accounting, water quality assessment, and land-use change within a single analytical framework, with quantitative trade-off analysis across blue, green, and grey water footprints, water quality outcomes, and land-use scenarios at watershed-to-regional scales. By highlighting research that links water availability, quality, and consumption across spatial and temporal scales, this topic seeks to uncover strategies that reduce blue water scarcity, mitigate nutrient loading, and enhance resilience under future climate and socio-economic scenarios.Our goal is to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and provide a platform for sharing case studies, modeling frameworks, and decision-support tools that can help bridge the gap between research and practice.This Research Topic welcomes original research, case studies, reviews, and perspective papers that investigate water security from an integrated standpoint. To preserve a clearly delimited niche, contributions must jointly mobilize at least two of the three core dimensions — water footprint, water quality, and land-use change — within a coherent integrated assessment; stand-alone studies addressing only one of these dimensions, or focused on climate impacts, flooding, governance, or water neutrality without engaging this integration, fall outside the scope. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:1. Water footprint analysis (blue, green, and grey) for agricultural, industrial, or municipal sectors, linked to water quality and/or land-use dimensions2. Joint assessment of climate and land-use change impacts on water quality and availability3. Blue water scarcity assessment and scenario-based modeling integrating land-use and water-quality outcomes4. Watershed-scale hydrologic and water quality modeling coupled with water footprint or land-use accounting5. Quantitative trade-off analysis across water use, water quality, and land-use scenarios from local to regional scales6. Policy and management strategies for sustainable water allocation informed by integrated water footprint–quality–land-use assessment7. Decision-support tools and data-driven approaches for water resource planning that operationalize the footprint–quality–land-use integrationSubmissions from multidisciplinary teams and studies bridging local to regional scales are encouraged. Contributions that integrate physical, social, and policy dimensions of water management will be given special emphasis. Topic editors: Naveen Joseph, JAYAKUMAR KV Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/74717/water-security-in-a-changing-climate-integrating-water-footprint-land-use-and-water-quality-from-local-to-regional-scales