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At present, inland fisheries are not often a national or regional governance priority and as a result, inland capture fisheries are undervalued and largely overlooked. As such they are threatened in both developing and developed countries. Indeed, due to lack of reliable data, inland fisheries have never been part of any high profile global fisheries assessment and are notably absent from the Sustainable Development Goals. The general public and policy makers are largely ignorant of the plight of freshwater ecosystems and the fish they support, as well as the ecosystem services generated by inland fisheries. This ignorance is particularly salient given that the current emphasis on the food-water-energy nexus often fails to include the important role that inland fish and fisheries play in food security and supporting livelihoods in low-income food deficit countries. Developing countries in Africa and Asia produce about 11 million tonnes of inland fish annually, 90 % of the global total. The role of inland fisheries goes beyond just kilocalories; fish provide important micronutrients and essentially fatty acids. In some regions, inland recreational fisheries are important, generating much wealth and supporting livelihoods. The following three key recommendations are necessary for action if inland fisheries are to become a part of the foodwater-energy discussion: invest in improved valuation and assessment methods, build better methods to effectively govern inland fisheries (requires capacity building and incentives), and develop approaches to managing waters across sectors and scales. Moreover, if inland fisheries are recognized as important to food security, livelihoods, and human well-being, they can be more easily incorporated in regional, national, and global policies and agreements on water issues. Through these approaches, inland fisheries can be better evaluated and be more fully recognized in broader water resource and aquatic ecosystem planning and decision-making frameworks, enhancing their value and sustainability for the future.

For millennium, mining sector is a source not only of mineral extraction for industrialization, economic expansion, and urban sprawling, but also of socio-environmental concern. It, therefore, has been the central attention of the business and public policy sustainable development scheme for several years. Thus, gradually, mining industries are getting involved with the concerns such as carbon emissions mitigation and carbon accounting to govern a rhetorical shift towards “sustainable mining”. However, there is scarce knowledge about how the emergence of a “green and self-sustaining” forestry reclamation strategy coupled with potential carbon sequestration capacity in degraded mining areas will be an impeccable option for achieving sustainable development goal-13 (SDG-13: climate action) and ecosystem services during United Nation decade of ecosystem restoration. This paper reviews the extent to which reforestation and sustainable land management practices that employed to enhance ecosystem carbon pool and atmospheric CO 2 sequestration capacity to offset CO 2 emission and SOC (soil organic carbon) losses, as consequences of coal mining, to partially mitigate global climate crisis. Moreover, future research is required on mining innovation concepts and its challenges for designing an SDG impact framework, so that it not only synergies amongst SDGs, but also trade-offs between each individual “politically legitimized post-2015 development agenda” (i.e. UNSDGs) could be depicted in a systematic way. In a developing country like India, it is also an utmost need to assess the environmental impact and economic performance of such technological innovation and its possible synergistic effect. Graphical abstract

Climate change is a global phenomenon that affects biophysical systems and human well-being. The Paris Agreement of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change entered into force in 2016 with the objective of strengthening the global response to climate change by keeping global temperature rise this century well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 °C. The agreement requires all Parties to submit their “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead. Reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is an important strategy for mitigating climate change, particularly in developing countries with large forests. Extensive tropical forest loss and degradation have increased awareness at the international level of the need to undertake large-scale ecological restoration, highlighting the need to identify cases in which restoration strategies can contribute to mitigation and adaptation. Here we consider Brazil as a case study to evaluate the benefits and challenges of implementing large-scale restoration programs in developing countries. The Brazilian NDC included the target of restoring and reforesting 12 million hectares of forests for multiple uses by 2030. Restoration of native vegetation is one of the foundations of sustainable rural development in Brazil and should consider multiple purposes, from biodiversity and ecosystem services conservation to social and economic development. However, ecological restoration still presents substantial challenges for tropical and mega-diverse countries, including the need to develop plans that are technically and financially feasible, as well as public policies and monitoring instruments that can assess effectiveness. The planning, execution, and monitoring of restoration efforts strongly depend on the context and the diagnosis of the area with respect to reference ecosystems (e.g., forests, savannas, grasslands, wetlands). In addition, poor integration of climate change policies at the national and subnational levels and with other sectorial policies constrains the large-scale implementation of restoration programs. The case of Brazil shows that slowing deforestation is possible; however, this analysis highlights the need for increased national commitment and international support for actions that require large-scale transformations of the forest sector regarding ecosystem restoration efforts. Scaling up the ambitions and actions of the Paris Agreement implies the need for a global framework that recognizes landscape restoration as a cost-effective nature-based solution and that supports countries in addressing their remaining needs, challenges, and barriers.

Humans create vast quantities of wastewater through inefficiencies and poor management of water systems. The wasting of water poses sustainability challenges, depletes energy reserves, and undermines human water security and ecosystem health. Here we review emerging approaches for reusing wastewater and minimizing its generation. These complementary options make the most of scarce freshwater resources, serve the varying water needs of both developed and developing countries, and confer a variety of environmental benefits. Their widespread adoption will require changing how freshwater is sourced, used, managed, and priced.

The increasing stress on lake ecosystems is affecting their functioning such as providing goods and services to inhabiting organisms and riparian communities. Monitoring of water quality is important for sustainable management and restoration of lake ecosystems. However, the costs associated with traditional approaches have become prohibitive, while not giving reliable early warning signals on resource conditions. Thus, the current shift in the use of bioindicators and multimetric indices (MMIs) in the monitoring of water quality is currently gaining global recognition with more emphasis on its application in lotic ecosystems. Therefore, this paper provides an elaborated insight into the application of macroinvertebrate-based MMIs in lentic ecosystems and the successes achieved so far. The various metrics and indices, the development strategies, application challenges, the use of macroinvertebrates as bioindicators, and the future projection of enhancing MMI usage in lentic environment monitoring, particularly in developing countries, are extensively covered. The use of MMI as a rapid lake biomonitoring tool needs to be adopted for sustainable applications in lake ecosystem management and as an integrated approach to monitoring human-induced stress especially in developing countries where there is a paucity of information.

The concept of well-being has evolved over the past several decades as research has continued to reveal its multidimensional, dynamic, person-specific and culture-specific nature. Most recently, the ecological embeddedness of well-being has also gained recognition, and this development of the concept demands that we explore and identify new conceptual frameworks and appropriate methodological approaches towards the assessment of quality of life within a socioecological context. This paper offers a review of seminal and current research in the fields of social indicators, human development, ecological economics, and natural resources management, with the aim of examining the concept and the various methodologies designed to assess both the objective and subjective components and the multiple dimensions that comprise well-being. We also present some methodological approaches that have the capacity to account for the role of ecosystem services, considering several studies of rural populations whose well-being depends on the flow of ecosystem services, highlighting the participatory methods these studies employed to identify and assess locally relevant well-being indicators, and addressing some of the challenges inherent in such methods. We conclude with an appraisal of what we regard as the most appropriate methodological approach for measuring human well-being in the socioecological context.

Aside from Ramsar Convention awareness programs, the concept of wetlands is mostly ignored in developing countries. Wetland ecosystems are essential to hydrological cycles, ecosystem diversity, climatic change, and economic activity. Under the Ramsar Convention, there are 2414 wetlands that are internationally recognized, and Pakistan is home to 19 of them. The major goal of this study is to use the satellite image technology to locate Pakistan’s underutilized wetlands (Borith, Phander, Upper Kachura, Satpara, and Rama Lakes). The other goals are to understand how these wetlands are affected by climate change, ecosystem change, and water quality. We used analytical techniques including supervised classification and Tasseled Cap Wetness to identify the wetlands. To find changes caused by climate change, Quick Bird high-resolution images was used to create the change detection index. Tasseled Cap Greenness and the Normalized Difference Turbidity Index were also used to assess the water quality and changes in the ecology in these wetlands. Sentinel-2 was used to analyze data from 2010 and 2020. ASTER DEM was also used to do a watershed analysis. The land surface temperature (°C) of a few selected wetlands was calculated using Modis data. Rainfall (mm) data was taken from PERSIANN (precipitation estimation from remotely sensed information using artificial neural networks) databases. Results indicated that in 2010, the water content of Borith, Phander, Upper Kachura, Satpara, and Rama Lakes was 22.83%, 20.82%, 22.26%, 24.40%, and 22.91%. While in 2020, these lakes’ water ratios are 21.33%, 20.65%, 21.76%, 23.85%, and 22.59%, respectively. Therefore, the competent authorities must take precautions to ensure that these wetlands are preserved in the future in order to improve the dynamics of the ecosystem.

Payment for watershed ecosystem services (PES) has been applied to water conservation and poverty reduction in an increasing number of developing countries. This study evaluates the effect of payment for watershed ecosystem services on farmers’ income in conservation intervention areas using a difference-in-differences model and a panel dataset that covers 18 countries in the Xin’an River Basin in China for fourteen consecutive years (2006–2019). The results show that PES programs increase farmers’ income and that the poverty reduction effect is sustainable. The PES programs mainly increase the farmers’ income in conservation intervention areas through two paths: triggering the transfer of agricultural labor and promoting agricultural restructuring. PES programs are pro-poor and more conducive to increasing the income of farmers in upstream regions and counties with lower levels of economic development. This paper reveals the specific role played by PES in promoting rural poverty reduction in developing countries, providing insights into alleviating the contradiction between poverty and watershed ecosystem protection.

Climate change (CC) threatens ecosystems in both developed and developing countries. As the impacts of CC are pervasive, global, and mostly irreversible, it is gaining worldwide attention. Here we review vulnerability and impacts of CC on forest and freshwater wetland ecosystems. We particularly look at investigations undertaken at different geographic regions in order to identify existing knowledge gaps and possible implications from such vulnerability in the context of Nepal along with available adaptation programs and national-level policy supports. Different categories of impacts which are attributed to disrupting structure, function, and habitat of both forest and wetland ecosystems are identified and discussed. We show that though still unaccounted, many facets of forest and freshwater wetland ecosystems of Nepal are vulnerable and likely to be impacted by CC in the near future. Provisioning ecosystem services and landscape-level ecosystem conservation are anticipated to be highly threatened with future CC. Finally, the need for prioritizing CC research in Nepal is highlighted to close the existing knowledge gap along with the implementation of adaptation measures based on existing location specific traditional socio-ecological system.