After World War II, Australians and new migrants rushed to build their dream home and garden. As housing estates proliferated in the suburbs, local authorities struggled to keep pace with increasing demand for water supply and sewerage connection. In all five cities, suburbs were constructed with no roads, kerbing and channelling, or sewerage. New subdivisions had reticulated water, but manual night cart collection continued in some suburbs and septic tanks were common until sewer lines were built. As the housing stock increased and septic systems were replaced with reticulated sewerage, water supplies were stretched beyond capacity. Authorities turned to the well-worn path of dam construction to increase supply, but when consumption exceeded capacity, especially in hot, dry seasons, unpopular water restrictions were implemented, with hoses and sprinklers banned. The sight of green suburban lawns turning brown undermined the myth of unlimited supply at the turn of a tap, but expectations were reinstated as soon as it rained.

Even when they are not directly related to the provision of water and sanitation services, business activities can be an important driver for the realization or, more frequent, violation of the HRtWS. The different ways those economic activities engage in development projects can affect the way people, notably traditional communities, access water and sanitation services. Usually, when confronting the economic and social benefits of those projects with the human rights risks for the affected communities, the mainstream narrative overestimates the former and makes the latter invisible. Among those business activities, megaprojects have a prominent role in terms of concerns for the HRtWS.

Section E seeks to show how the law on the conduct of hostilities that would apply in relation to the use of conventional weapons also applies in respect of nuclear weapon operations. The Rules and Commentaries deal with persons participating in the hostilities, who are distinguished from protected civilians, and with specific issues of naval and air warfare. The Rules and Commentaries on nuclear targeting address the notion of ‘attack’, the principle of distinction, prohibited nuclear attacks, the definition of military objectives, proportionality and active and passive precautions. As to methods of nuclear warfare, the Section addresses perfidy and ruses, the improper use of protective indicators and emblems, as well as the concept of zones. The Section further includes Rules and Commentaries on persons and objects entitled to specific protection and on the protection of the natural environment in times of armed conflict.

Millions of dams fragment and degrade Earth’s riparian landscapes. This chapter examines linkages between dams, rivers, and the environment and is subdivided into three sections, including riparian impacts of dams, dam removal, and reservoir sediment management strategies. The latter is crucial to sustain downstream fluvial environments and water resource infrastructure. Trapping of fluvial sediments in upstream reservoirs results in downstream degradation of riparian environments by channel bed incision and terrestrialization of aquatic habitat. In North America and western Europe dam removal for environmental restoration is occurring at a brisk pace, but in Southeast Asia, South America, southeast Europe, and parts of Africa dam construction for hydropower is rapidly occurring. Dam removal is an emerging science with great potential to improve downstream riparian ecosystems. It is essential that government agencies develop strategies to sustainably manage reservoirs so that fluvial sediments can be reactivated and transported to downstream riparian and deltaic environments to offset subsidence and sea level rise.

The São Francisco river crosses some of the driest parts of the Brazilian Semi-arid Region and brings life to ecosystems and to millions of people. Droughts are a recurrent problem in the basin. Since the second part of the twentieth century, several dams, irrigation projects, and water and sanitation systems have been built, and these developments have impacted river conditions, such as stream flows, sedimentation, silting, and water quality. The development of the river, and its engineering solutions, have prioritized the hydroelectric and agricultural sectors. This has started to change with the new water law of 1997 and the creation of the National Water Agency (ANA) in 2000. This chapter reviews current water management and use in the basin as well as the scenarios, which indicate that, in the future, precipitation and stream flows may be reduced significantly due to climate change while water demand will increase due to population growth and development.

The Yellow River is by its nature not sustainable since it carried the world’s heaviest silt load for a long time. Yet, this silt load (loess plateau) has fallen considerably in recent years, but at the cost of other forms of sustainability, such as streamflow. The reasons for this dramatic decline in runoff are complex. In addition to reducing silt load, terraces and vegetation have led to the marked reduction in runoff. The fall in natural runoff can also be attributed to groundwater and mining extractions, as well as reservoir filling. Population per se is not a major driver of water demand compared to irrigated agriculture and other sectors, notably mining and industry. While China is not a federal system, it is organized in a complex hierarchical system where provinces play an important role and are capable of serving their own interests in negotiating usages and allocations of the river. The chapter analyzes peculiar physical conditions and water management institutions in the Yellow River Basin.

Large dams are emerging drivers of landscape-scale habitat fragmentation, causing extensive flooding and transforming hilltops into islands. Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs; the process to assess and account for impacts of development) do not explicitly consider reservoir islands in calculations of habitat impacted by dam construction. Reservoir islands maintain relict biological communities from the previously continuous habitat. Relict communities are subject to an extinction debt whereby species are lost over time. We demonstrate how estimating the ‘conservation value’ of islands (CV; the proportion of relict continuous habitat [forest] species on islands) using relict species–area relationships (RSARs), can be used in an area-of-impact correction tool to account for insular habitats in EIAs. We used data from eight taxonomic groups within the Balbina Hydroelectric Reservoir (BHR) archipelago in Brazilian Amazonia. We found ca. 72,000 ha of insular habitat had reduced CV, equating to 60% of aggregate island area, and that an additional 24% of the ca. 300,000 ha BHR water surface area should be included in area assessments for impacted terrestrial habitat. Where reservoir island creation is unavoidable, using RSARs to assess the CV of islands enables more accurate and dynamic assessment of the ecological impacts of dam construction.

European colonial trade with Africa set the stage for international interventions to “modernize” African economies. Since the 1880s colonial economists pressed for modernization and industrialization in Africa, but only to the extent that this aided the extraction of resources through the use of inexpensive African labor. Modernization thus had its limits in Africa, and only very rarely emerged out of partnerships with Africans. Large-scale, colonial industrial projects supplied cheap raw materials and managerial jobs for Europeans. Colonial governments and Western-owned companies industrialized the mining sectors of segregated states in southern Africa in order to generate profit for themselves, and not necessarily to aid the “modernization” of local economies. Even in postcolonial and postapartheid African states, industrialization has helped the few rather than the masses. Yet Africans have established their own projects for developing agriculture, mining, and manufacturing in order to improve their societies. Africans have taken the initiative to modernize their economies and form partnerships with governments and private funders on mutually beneficial terms. Despite the long history of Western dominance over discourses on economic modernization, African industrialization and economic development does not always (and does not have to) look like Western modernity.

Freshwater biodiversity is threatened by growing human consumption and contamination of fresh water - a globally scarce resource. As human populations increase, the quality and quantity available for freshwater biodiversity declines.The result is a tragedy of the freshwater commons with increasing competition among groups of humans – evident from the hydropolitics of transboundary rivers - and between humans and nature.Humans may even be approaching the planetary boundary for freshwater use.Pollution and contamination are widespread, with emerging threats from microplastics and pharmaceuticals.Dams, drainage-basin disturbance, climate change, alien species, and overexploitation of aquatic animals pose additional threats.Their synergistic effects are evident from a global analysis of rivers: both biodiversity and human water security are at risk in many parts of the world while, in others, investments in infrastructure have enhanced water security although biodiversity remains under threat. Everywhere on Earth where there are substantial human populations, freshwater biodiversity is threatened.In many of these places, human water security is at risk also.

Anthropogenic alteration of river flows, lake levels, and the duration and extent of wetland inundation – collectively, flow regulation – degrades habitats, with manifold direct and indirect effects on populations, community structure and food webs. These can arise from an overall insufficiency of water, or changes in flow that result in there being too much or too little water at particular times.Fluxes of sediments and nutrients are also affected by trapping in dams, while water released downstream may have altered temperature, flow magnitude or periodicity, and erosive power.To mitigate such effects in rivers and associated wetlands, it is essential to allocate sufficient water as an environmental flow (e-flow) in order to sustain native biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.There is general consensus that this allocation should involve sufficient water to mimic the natural flow regime.Obstruction of movement of materials and migrations by animals (mainly fishes) by dams will require different and innovative solutions, and the proliferation of hydropower dams on large rivers (Amazon, Mekong) will have serious consequences for ecology and fishery yields.

This chapter examines how rivers respond to human impacts. It introduces the concept of the Anthropocene, the notion that society has produced a new geologic epoch dominated by human change of the environment, as the context for discussion. A distinction is made between indirect impacts on rivers, which involve changes in land cover or climate, and direct impacts, which involve human modification of river channels. Cycles of erosion and deposition within river systems are discussed in relation to land clearing, implementation of agriculture, different stages of urbanization, and hydraulic mining. The potential impacts of climate change on rivers are also explored. Direct impacts on rivers include channelization, construction of dams, and in-channel mining. The ways in which direct and indirect human impacts on rivers lead to transient geomorphological responses are explored through the concepts of the channel evolution model and aggradational-degradational episodes.