Water Scarcity and Land Degradation Nexus in the Anthropocene: Reformations for Advanced Water Management as Per the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Over the last decays, soil and water pollution resulting from land degradation has led to strong impacts on the epoch of Anthropocene with unknown dimensions and large costs for society. In some cases, clear links have been established between the specific contaminants (e.g., heavy metal contamination) and their direct effects, in other cases, the links are rather unknown (e.g., endocrine substances). In the global context, health impacts of acute or chronic exposure to soil contaminants are of particular interest, and decision makers and researchers have not paid much attention to it until now. Soil contaminants may be responsible for serious health effects resulting in large secondary costs, but holistic studies for identifying the sources of contamination, health impact, and secondary costs are still lacking. Soil pollution leads to serious health problems spanning from cancer, neurological damage, lower IQ, kidney disease, skeletal and bone diseases to endocrine disruption causing sterility or adiposity. Unfortunately, soil pollution will not affect human health by the direct contact with the soil only. Indirect effects are also possible e.g. by the uptake of pollutants by plants used as animal feedstuff or food, incorporation of soil-borne dust, or contaminated drinking water. Nevertheless, it is a daunting task to make strong scientific connections between soil contamination and human health because a holistic study of soil contamination and human health has to be multidisciplinary involving soil scientists, hydrologists, meteorologists, toxicologists, endocrinologist, medical doctors, anthropologists, etc. A community-level socio-economical approach is necessary for addressing the individual environmental deterioration of soils and human activities and maintaining the sustainable goals. On the other hand, it also has to be clearly stated that each heavy soil contamination does not affect population health dramatically and that sometimes low contamination might affect population health even more dramatically, especially, if the pollution-health functional chain is not well understood. This is the need of the hour to try and eradicate some factors behind the present threatening environment and make our mother earth a better place to live in. Therefore, much more research is needed to address all the issues related to this topic.