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Climate change and human activity are leading to water scarcity in southwestern Europe. Groundwater use is thought to be unsustainable in the region, yet regional assessments using measured data are missing. Here, we evaluate long-term trends and drivers of groundwater levels and found a more complex situation. Historical data (1960–2020) from 12,398 wells in Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy showed 20% with rising groundwater levels, 68% were stable, and only 12% were declining. Rising wells in temperate climates were due to increased precipitation. Recovering wells in semi-arid regions were attributed to improved groundwater management. Stable wells are concentrated in temperate climates with year-round high precipitation. Declining wells in semi-arid regions are primarily located near agricultural areas and experience prolonged summer soil moisture loss, whereas in temperate regions, the decline is associated with large urban areas. Systematic groundwater monitoring and data sharing are essential for sustainable and science-based water resources management.

The Nile River is the primary water source for populous and hyper-arid Egypt. However, it suffers from the backfilling of its extensive network of waterways and increasing encroachments along its banks. The Nile’s waterways are among the world’s oldest and largest water irrigation systems. As an integral component of the Nile water system, they are vital in sustaining agriculture, inhabitants’ quality of life in urban and rural settings, and various ecosystem services. Therefore, raising public awareness and a sense of connectivity with the conservation of these waterways is one of the primary mitigation strategies for addressing the dire water deficit in Egypt resulting from rapid population growth and flow alteration associated with increased upstream damming. The large-scale degradation of the waterways system, observed since the mid-1980s, is perplexing, as Egyptians were historically more oriented to preserving the Nile ecosystem and the interrelated landscape for thousands of years. To assess the root cause of this phenomenon, we review the waterways’ public conservation campaigns and explore the grounds for their inefficiencies, failures, and subsequent impacts on transboundary water management. To achieve this objective, we compiled several research publications, local technical reports, and ground observations. Our results show that negligence toward the waterways accelerated during the nation’s transition from water sufficiency in the 1970s (1400 m3/capita/year) to the onset of scarcity in the 1980s (<1000 m3/capita/year). The water authorities’ delay of 15 years in implementing conservation campaigns, which were unhurriedly initiated in the mid-1990s, along with unsustainable landscape transformations, led to nationwide water misuse and sanitary degradation of the Nile’s infrastructure. Considering the findings of our review, we provide recommendations for improving the efficiency of waterways conservation campaigns. Our

Waterways’ regeneration is proposed as one of the main mitigation strategies for addressing the alarming water budget deficit in the populous, hyper-arid Egypt, relying primarily on the Nile as its most important water source. The latter is increasingly under pressure from a rise in internal consumption, droughts, and upstream damming. We perform herein a review of the state of knowledge of waterways in the Nile Delta and the environmental drivers that resulted in their degradation. We evaluate how these degradations are associated with the decadal changes in their socioeconomic context and how these changes impacted the public perception of the waterways’ functionality from irrigation canals to sewage sites. The above led to littering, pollution, and negligence toward their preservation, which consequently accelerated their gradual landfilling as a response to their contamination triggering severe public health and ecosystem degradation concerns. The extensive landfilling further compromised their role in crop production, water conservation, and ecosystem integrity. We review and compile several published reports and perform field investigations to assess the current state of knowledge on the physical degradation of waterways in the Nile Delta for the last 60 years. Our results suggest that the alarming increase in informal settlements, resulting from multiple economic shifts and rapid urban sprawl, is the primary cause of waterways degradation and landfilling as well as the reductionin their total area by ∼30 % from ∼207,912 ha in 1987 to ∼146,381 ha in 2019. We suggest a landscape-based design built on the Nile’s natural heritage to efficiently regenerate the areas surrounding these waterways to enable their role in addressing the water budget deficit and ensuring sustainable ecosystem services.

The issue of leakage and spillage of light non-aqueous phase liquids (LNAPLs) and aqueous phase liquids (APLs) contribute to groundwater contamination, resulting in groundwater pollution and rendering the quality of groundwater unsafe for drinking and agricultural use. This paper aimed to investigate the APL and LNAPL in the deformable double-porosity soil, which has become important for sustainability of groundwater utilization and a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of APL and LNAPL migration into the groundwater through the use of digital image processing techniques. The results of the experiments show that the flow of the APL and LNAPL migration was not uniformly downward. Faster migration occurred at the cracked soil surface condition compared to other locations on the soil surface that were not cracked, even when not using a liquid such as toluene. It was concluded that the factors that significantly influenced the APL and LNAPL migration was the soil sample structure, soil sample fracture pattern, physical interaction bonding between the liquid and soil sample, and capillary pressure of the fluid. The output of this study indicates that digital image analysis can provide detailed information to enable researchers to have better understanding and simulating the pattern of liquids migration characteristics that influence the groundwater resources.

Soil erosion resulting from heavy rainfall, depends on a number of factors, such as the native soil properties (the angle of internal friction, cohesion, unit weight, etc.), hydraulic conditions (surface runoff, groundwater seepage, etc.), the removal of vegetation and change in the surrounding environment. This study investigated the preliminary factors that could cause Soil erosion and detailed the literature through an exhaustive review of the previous published materials on the field and laboratory research works dealing with the soil erosion control techniques.

Modeling and predicting geohazards is extremely difficult due to their complex behavior in the real-world. In fact, several aspects of these environmental applications are considered in computer-based modeling to accurately estimating real-world phenomena. Till date, none of the proposed methods have reached to zero uncertainties or errors to recognize the entire disaster’s events. Globally, many people have lost their lives due to various types of natural hazards. Therefore, it is important to detect, monitor and predict them to protect the inhabitants against the potential natural hazards that threaten human lives and properties. Recently, artificial intelligent (AI) methods have received a great deal of attraction due to their precision to model the complex problems such as natural hazards. AI can see different aspects of a complex problem with sufficient iteration and details. In recent years, implementation of AI models coupled with geospatial information systems (GIS) are the most efficient and accurate approach to model natural disasters i.e. flooding, earthquake, landslides, forest fire and drought rather than other existing methods. This gives an insight into the ability of applied AI models in some natural hazards applications.

Volumes of geological and geophysical (G & G) data sources exist in the Nile Delta basin, covering approximately 60,000 km2 in both onshore and offshore areas. Although several varieties of data continue to support the exploration and field development activities in the basin, the Big Data sources are largely unstructured, heterogeneous and multidimensional. Connecting various G & G events of onshore-transition-offshore zones and integrating them into a single repository is a complicated process. The authors proposed a holistic data warehousing and mining methodology that can support logical and physical data organization, easing the data integration process in the warehouse repository. In addition, an implementable framework, the Nile Delta Digital Petroleum Ecosystem (NDDPE) was articulated, assessing its usability and interoperability with associated data artefacts. The NDDPE can deliver Big Data guided digital ecosystem solutions that can minimize the risk of exploration.