The review, led by Md. Hayder Khan Sujan and colleagues, followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines for systematic reviews. The team searched Scopus, Web of Science and the first ten pages of Google Scholar results, then screened reference lists for additional studies. From 1,085 initial records, 652 remained after de-duplication, 119 survived title and abstract screening, and 30 were excluded at full text, leaving 89 database studies plus six identified through citation chaining. The final corpus was overwhelmingly primary research: 96 percent of the included publications were original research articles, and 66 percent relied solely on primary data, with quantitative and mixed-method designs each accounting for 47 percent of the sample.

Geographically, the evidence is heavily skewed. Seventy-nine of the 95 studies covered the southwest coast, the zone most severely affected by salinity intrusion, while 35 addressed the south-central coast and only nine examined the southeast, where cyclones, flash floods, landslides and coastal erosion dominate the hazard profile. Khulna district appeared in 43 studies and Satkhira in 40, whereas several southeastern districts featured in a handful of papers or none at all. The authors caution that this concentration may leave policymakers with an evidence base that disproportionately supports aquaculture-centric interpretations of coastal adaptation, without knowing whether strategies validated in the southwest transfer to the cyclone-prone and hilly southeast.

Across the corpus, five recurrent strategy groups emerged. Integrated agriculture-aquaculture and farm-enterprise diversification was the most frequently reported, appearing in 48 percent of studies, with rice-shrimp combinations cited in 14 documents, rice-fish in 12, rice-prawn in 9, rice-non-rice rotations in 8 and fish-shrimp systems in 7. Aquaculture-driven land-use change and farming-system diversification followed at 47 percent, and stress-tolerant crop adaptation at 42 percent, led by saline-tolerant crops in 30 studies, early-maturing varieties in 15, drought-tolerant varieties in 11, submergence-tolerant crops in 8 and heat-tolerant varieties in 3. Community-based agroecological diversification, including sorjan raised-bed farming, dike cropping, homestead gardening, floating farming and agroforestry, appeared in 41 percent, while cropping-pattern and management adjustments such as shifted sowing dates, rotation, intercropping and relay cropping appeared in 23 percent.

Applying the DPSIR framework, the reviewers found that climate variability was the most frequently reported driver, cited in 70 of the studies that identified drivers, far ahead of market access at 15. Salinity intrusion was the most frequently reported pressure, named in 43 studies, followed by shrimp-driven land-use change at 27 and drought and flooding at 18. The prevailing state of the agroecosystem, described in 64 studies, was dominated by the expanding footprint of shrimp, crab and fish aquaculture, reported in 41 studies, alongside waterlogged and impeded drainage in 23 and poor soil fertility in 8. Impacts, documented in 57 studies, centred on reduced farm productivity, income and employment in 39 studies, soil and water quality deterioration in 24 and decreased food and nutrition security in 16. The authors stress that these frequencies describe the distribution of reported evidence, not the prevalence of any practice among coastal farmers.

The pattern of drivers leads to one of the review’s central conclusions: diversification in coastal Bangladesh is characterised in the literature primarily as defensive adaptation rather than market-driven development. Farmers are, in the main, responding to environmental stress rather than pursuing opportunity. Yet the co-reporting of economic incentives in 56 studies suggests a more nuanced picture, including cases where farmers convert saline constraints into productive advantages, as in rice-shrimp and rice-fish systems that exploit brackish water rather than fight it. The Government of Bangladesh has itself identified crop diversification as a climate-smart strategy, but the review notes that progress towards sustainable diversification remains limited despite multiple policies and projects targeting coastal regions.

The most sobering finding concerns who benefits. Although diversification was broadly associated with income stability, higher cropping intensity and reduced reliance on a single income source, the evidence indicates these gains are unevenly distributed, with access mediated by capital constraints. Infrastructure-intensive strategies such as aquaculture conversion, sorjan beds and gher pond-dike systems require upfront earthmoving, labour and investment that resource-poor smallholders often cannot mobilise, and studies have reported such transitions displacing rice-dependent smallholders and reducing productivity, income and employment among some poorer households. A smaller body of work documented marginalisation and exclusion in 4 studies, out-migration in 9 and social conflict in 2, though the authors urge caution because these figures rest on few studies and no formal quality appraisal was performed.

The DPSIR lens also exposes feedback loops that linear adaptation models tend to miss. A response to one pressure, such as converting salt-affected cropland to shrimp aquaculture, produces a new system state, expanding aquaculture area, which can co-occur with fresh pressures including waterlogging, impeded drainage, disease outbreaks and market concentration, and with impacts such as reduced ecosystem services, reported in only 7 studies and therefore interpreted cautiously. Greater reliance on shrimp and crab may also heighten vulnerability to disease, price swings and climate shocks. In the reviewers’ framing, an ostensibly adaptive response can be associated with new vulnerabilities through ecological degradation and social marginalisation, and unplanned aquaculture-oriented diversification may put long-term sustainability at risk.

Not all strategies carry the same barriers. Research attention to community-based agroecological diversification rose sharply, from 4 studies during 2006-2015 to 30 during 2021-2025, with similar growth for stress-tolerant crop adaptation, from 5 to 27 studies, and aquaculture-driven land-use change, from 9 to 19. Seed-based technologies and low-input practices such as homestead gardening, reported in 14 studies, and floating agriculture, in 13, may offer more accessible alternatives for capital-constrained households, and adjusting sowing and harvesting times or rotating crops provides relatively low-risk options. However, the review flags a tension: reported soil and water quality deterioration and poor soil fertility raise concerns that improved varieties alone may not deliver lasting benefits without complementary resource-management investments, and sorjan and floating systems remain largely restricted to waterlogged areas.

The authors identify clear gaps for future research. Locally led adaptations lack longitudinal evidence on long-term performance, scalability and adoption dynamics under prolonged climatic stress. The cumulative landscape-scale effects of uncoordinated diversification, particularly shrimp and crab expansion, remain poorly quantified. Land tenure and property rights, which shape incentives for long-term investment, appeared in only 3 studies, and common-property resources such as khash land and canals in just 2. Research and policy also lean heavily toward export-oriented shrimp, prawn and crab systems, potentially overlooking subsistence and vegetable-based pathways that may be more inclusive and environmentally sustainable. The review’s limitations, including an English-language-only search, screening primarily by a single reviewer and no formal methodological quality appraisal, mean conclusions drawn from small numbers of studies warrant particular caution. Even so, the synthesis argues that strengthening coastal resilience will require context-specific, systems-oriented approaches that combine farmer innovation, appropriate technology, institutional support and equitable access to credit and markets, lessons the authors suggest are transferable to other deltaic, climate-vulnerable coastal regions worldwide.

Subject of Research: Systematic review of crop and farming-system diversification strategies for agricultural resilience in coastal Bangladesh using the DPSIR framework

Article Title: Crop and farming-system diversification strategies for coastal agricultural resilience: a systematic review through DPSIR lens

Article References: Sujan, M. H. K., Kotir, J. H., Abdul Aziz, A., & Akber, M. A. (2026). Crop and farming-system diversification strategies for coastal agricultural resilience: a systematic review through DPSIR lens. Regional Environmental Change, 26(4), Article 221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02709-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02709-5

Keywords: coastal Bangladesh, crop diversification, farming systems, salinity intrusion, DPSIR framework, systematic review, aquaculture, climate adaptation, smallholder farmers, social-ecological systems, PRISMA, Regional Environmental Change

The research team, led by Richmond Oppong Darko of the Department of Planning at KNUST and colleagues from the university’s Centre for Settlement Studies, surveyed 356 residents across Ayeduase, Kotei, Bomso, and Deduako. These communities were purposefully selected because of their proximity to the university campus and their distinctive land-use patterns, making them ideal case studies for understanding how academic institutions act as engines of urban growth. The researchers combined closed-ended questionnaires with open-ended interviews, allowing them to capture both quantitative measures of environmental change and the nuanced, lived experiences of residents navigating that change.

The most striking finding concerns the sheer speed of physical transformation. Between 2003 and 2023, built-up infrastructure in the study area expanded from 65.8 percent to 87.05 percent of the land surface. That represents a dramatic conversion of what was once agricultural land, forest patches, and open space into residential blocks, student hostels, commercial premises, and access roads. The researchers attribute this acceleration primarily to the university’s growing population and the corresponding demand for student and staff housing, which spills well beyond the campus boundary into neighboring settlements.

This pattern is not unique to Kumasi. Across sub-Saharan Africa, universities have increasingly been recognized as anchors of urbanization, drawing migrants, stimulating local economies, and generating secondary development that municipal authorities often struggle to regulate. What makes the KNUST case particularly instructive is the clarity with which the causal chain can be traced: institutional growth drives population influx, population influx drives housing demand, and housing demand drives land conversion with measurable environmental consequences.

Among those consequences, residents identified noise pollution as the single most pressing concern, cited by 38.9 percent of respondents. Poor waste management followed closely at 33.1 percent. These are not abstract environmental indicators but daily realities that shape quality of life, public health, and community cohesion. Noise from student hostels, commercial activities, and increased vehicular traffic disrupts sleep patterns and contributes to stress, while inadequate waste collection infrastructure leads to open dumping, blocked drains, and heightened disease risk during the rainy season.

Beyond these two dominant complaints, the study documented a 21.25 percent loss of green infrastructure across the study period. Trees, vegetated buffers, and informal green spaces that once moderated local temperatures, absorbed stormwater, and supported urban biodiversity have been progressively cleared to make way for construction. This loss compounds other environmental pressures: increased carbon emissions from growing vehicular traffic, and poor drainage systems that, combined with wetland encroachment, have made flooding a recurring hazard in low-lying areas.

The researchers employed the Drivers-Pressures-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework to structure their analysis, a widely used conceptual model in sustainability science that links causal drivers to environmental pressures, changes in environmental state, impacts on human wellbeing, and societal responses. This framework allowed the team to move beyond simple correlation and articulate the specific mechanisms through which university expansion translates into environmental degradation, from land-use change and population density to infrastructure overload and ecosystem service loss.

Based on their findings, the researchers propose a set of policy interventions aimed at reconciling continued academic growth with environmental sustainability. They recommend strict zoning and building regulations to manage urban expansion, the establishment of waste recycling programs developed in partnership with the university, the enforcement of noise control policies, and the creation of community-based biodiversity conservation initiatives that promote green infrastructure and mass transit systems. These recommendations reflect a growing recognition that universities cannot be treated as isolated institutional enclaves but must be integrated into broader urban planning frameworks.

The study’s implications extend well beyond Ghana. As higher education systems across Africa and the Global South continue to expand in response to rising demand, the environmental footprint of that expansion will only grow. Cities hosting major universities face a choice between reactive management, where environmental problems are addressed only after they become crises, and proactive planning, where institutional growth is anticipated and its spatial and ecological consequences are managed from the outset. The KNUST case suggests that without deliberate policy intervention, the latter path is far more likely to produce sustainable outcomes.

What emerges from this research is a portrait of university communities as complex socio-ecological systems where institutional ambition, market forces, and environmental limits intersect. The residents of Ayeduase, Kotei, Bomso, and Deduako are not passive recipients of change but active stakeholders whose perceptions and priorities must inform any credible sustainability strategy. As the researchers conclude, building a more sustainable environment in these communities will require coordinated action from researchers, policymakers, planners, and the university itself, working together to ensure that the benefits of academic expansion are not purchased at an unsustainable environmental cost.

Subject of Research: Environmental impacts of university-driven urbanization in communities near KNUST, Ghana

Article Title: Environmental costs of university expansion: perceptions and policy implications in selected communities, Ghana

Article References: Oppong Darko, R., Mensah, H., Asamoah, P. K. B., Boafo, H. K., Adazuru, P., & Simpeh, E. K. (2026). Environmental costs of university expansion: perceptions and policy implications in selected communities, Ghana. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 388. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01633-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01633-z

Keywords: university expansion, urbanization, Ghana, KNUST, environmental degradation, noise pollution, waste management, land use change, DPSIR framework, urban planning, green infrastructure, sustainability

The numbers behind the study tell a stark story of shrinking margins. Per capita water availability in the Annaba region has collapsed from 1,500 cubic meters per year in 1962 to roughly 500 cubic meters today, placing the area below the absolute water scarcity threshold defined by the Falkenmark index. A population of approximately two million people depends heavily, and often exclusively, on the coastal aquifer, which is being pumped at an estimated 250 to 280 cubic hectometers per year, a rate that approaches or exceeds the estimated renewable resource. The consequences are visible in the data: piezometric levels are falling by one to two meters per year in central sectors, seawater has pushed inland across a 10 to 15 kilometer coastal band, and nitrate concentrations from inadequate wastewater treatment and agricultural inputs exceed World Health Organization drinking water standards in multiple areas.

Geologically, the Annaba plain is a subsiding tectonic graben wedged between the Edough metamorphic massif, the Numidian fold-and-thrust belt, and the Mediterranean Sea. Its aquifer consists of Quaternary sands, gravels, and clays reaching thicknesses of up to 150 meters in the central plain, resting on Miocene marls that act as a regional aquitard. With mean annual rainfall of 600 to 800 millimeters and potential evapotranspiration exceeding 1,200 millimeters, the hydrological balance is delicate: recharge is limited, and human abstraction increasingly captures water that would naturally discharge toward the sea. This configuration makes the system acutely sensitive to any sustained increase in pumping, and it explains why the authors argue that understanding who is using the water, and why, matters as much as mapping the aquifer itself.

To capture the interplay between economics and hydrogeology, the team built a framework called CWIMSAM, the Conceptual Water Integrated Model for Semi-Arid Mediterranean basins. It organizes the problem using the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response logic adopted by the European Environment Agency: socioeconomic drivers such as income growth and tourism generate abstraction pressures that alter the physical state of the aquifer, producing drawdown, seawater intrusion, and nitrate accumulation, which in turn create health and economic impacts that demand institutional responses. Crucially, the framework closes the loop, feeding observed degradation back into governance levers such as leak reduction, treated wastewater reuse, and progressive water pricing, so that management decisions continuously adjust to changing conditions.

The quantitative heart of the study is a Multi-Layer Perceptron neural network with a 14-7-1 architecture: fourteen socioeconomic input variables, seven hidden neurons, and a single output representing groundwater abstraction. The inputs ranged from population and per capita income to tourism, water pricing, agricultural consumption, and unaccounted-for water losses. Because only 21 municipalities were available as training cases, the researchers took unusual care to avoid overfitting. They tested 500 candidate network configurations, enforced a structural constraint limiting the number of trainable weights relative to sample size, applied automated early stopping, and then subjected the final model to leave-one-out cross-validation, in which each municipality was held out in turn and predicted by a network trained on the other twenty. The cross-validated coefficient of determination of 0.929 and correlation of 0.967 confirmed that the model generalizes genuinely rather than memorizing its small dataset.

The sensitivity analysis that followed produced the study’s most policy-relevant result. Per capita income emerged as the single most influential driver of groundwater withdrawal, with tourism ranked second, followed by agricultural water consumption and per capita consumption. This finding overturns the conventional attribution of overexploitation to population growth and agricultural expansion. The authors interpret the income-abstraction link through multiple demand pathways: greater household appliance ownership, swimming pools, expansion of the commercial and hospitality sector, and the replacement of traditional water-efficient practices with water-intensive modern lifestyles. Tourism is particularly problematic because Algeria’s post-hydrocarbon economic diversification agenda promotes coastal development precisely in the municipalities most vulnerable to seawater intrusion, creating a direct tension between economic strategy and aquifer sustainability that is currently not addressed in Algerian water governance.

Multivariate statistics then translated these findings into a spatial management map. Principal component analysis reduced thirteen variables to three factors explaining 71 percent of the variance, dominated by an abstraction factor linking water withdrawal with stormwater coverage, population, income, and tourism. Hierarchical cluster analysis split the 21 municipalities into two sharply contrasting zones. An inland cluster of 18 municipalities faces vulnerability dominated by diffuse agricultural runoff and urban land-use pressures. A coastal cluster of just three municipalities, Bouteldja, Pont Bouchet, and Salines, forms what the authors call a coastal abstraction and salinization hotspot. These towns sit atop highly permeable unconfined dune sands with hydraulic conductivities of 10 to the minus 4 to 10 to the minus 3 meters per second and no protective clay cover, host the public wellfields supplying the city of Annaba with abstraction exceeding 150 cubic hectometers per year, and show electrical conductivity above 4,000 microsiemens per centimeter and chloride concentrations above 1,000 milligrams per liter, signatures of aggressive seawater intrusion.

The study’s health risk component adds an alarming human dimension. Drawing on the most spatially exhaustive multi-element monitoring dataset available, a 2019 baseline of 20 sampling points around an unlined landfill that receives roughly 200 tons of waste daily, the team quantified cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc exposure under agricultural and livestock scenarios following USEPA and WHO methodologies. The results are sobering. Cadmium ingestion via root vegetables yielded hazard quotients of 31.9 for children and 13.7 for adults, against an acceptable threshold of 1, while lead reached 6.64 in children. In the livestock pathway, zinc exposure through milk consumption exceeded safety limits with hazard quotients of 5.23 for children and 2.61 for adults. Even dermal contact with cadmium-contaminated sludge during agricultural work produced an unacceptable non-carcinogenic risk of 1.59 alongside a carcinogenic excess lifetime risk of 9.67 times 10 to the minus 7. The authors caution that these values represent a conservative baseline profile rather than real-time exposure, since geochemical conditions in coastal aquifers shift over time, but they underscore an urgent need for remediation and continuous monitoring.

What distinguishes this work is its insistence that the findings translate directly into differentiated policy. The authors propose a five-step institutional roadmap for Algerian water authorities, beginning with a shared spatial data platform among the basin agency, water directorate, and utility, then embedding the neural network into an operational decision-support system that triggers early-warning alerts when projected abstraction exceeds sustainable yield. The two management zones would then receive tailored regulation: strict moratoria on new private wells, mandatory metering, and priority allocation of desalinated supplies in the vulnerable coastal cluster, versus managed aquifer recharge with treated wastewater and agricultural best practices inland. Because unaccounted-for water losses run at 30 to 45 percent across the study area, well above the Mediterranean average, network rehabilitation alone could recover an estimated 75 to 105 cubic hectometers per year of supply without asking consumers to reduce demand at all.

The broader significance extends well beyond Annaba. North African coastal aquifers, from Tunisia’s Jeffara plain to Morocco’s agricultural basins, face the same convergence of semi-arid climate, rapid socioeconomic change, and fragile geology, and roughly 70 percent of the region’s agricultural production and domestic supply depends on groundwater. The authors argue that the CWIMSAM framework, with its modular design allowing local recalibration of the neural network and cluster structure, is transferable across these systems, and its explicit linkage to Sustainable Development Goal 6 indicators positions it as a practical instrument for national water security reporting. Future work will integrate CMIP6 climate projections, expand monitoring to sub-municipal resolution, and apply isotope tracers to quantify seawater mixing. But the core message is already clear: in water-scarce coastal regions, managing demand means managing prosperity itself, and the tools to do so now exist.

Subject of Research: Integrated hydrogeological and socioeconomic assessment of groundwater vulnerability in the Annaba coastal aquifer, northeastern Algeria

Article Title: Groundwater resource vulnerability in the annaba coastal aquifer, northeastern Algeria: integrating hydrogeological and socio-economic drivers for sustainable management

Article References: Hani, S., Harrat, N., Hamzaoui, W., & Reghais, A. (2026). Groundwater resource vulnerability in the annaba coastal aquifer, northeastern Algeria: integrating hydrogeological and socio-economic drivers for sustainable management. Frontiers in Earth Science, 14, Article 1888646. https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2026.1888646

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feart.2026.1888646

Keywords: groundwater, coastal aquifer, seawater intrusion, Algeria, artificial neural networks, water scarcity, heavy metal contamination, health risk assessment, DPSIR framework, tourism, water management, Mediterranean

Messenia is an ideal natural laboratory for this kind of investigation. The region combines intensive agriculture, particularly olive cultivation, with a coastline that draws large numbers of tourists each summer. Both activities place heavy demands on groundwater, the primary water source for irrigation, drinking supply, and the hospitality industry. The aquifers underlying the region are coastal, which means they are inherently vulnerable to seawater intrusion when pumping reduces freshwater pressure. Overexploitation draws saline water landward, and agricultural runoff adds nitrogen loads that percolate slowly through the soil into the saturated zone. The result is a double threat: salinization from the sea and nitrate pollution from the land.

The research team, led by Marietta Theodoropoulou of the Hellenic Survey of Geology and Mineral Exploration and Panagiotis Papazotos of the National Technical University of Athens, analyzed borehole data spanning five years, from 2018 to 2022. This window allowed them to compare groundwater chemistry across three distinct phases of human activity: the pre-Anthropopause period of normal economic operation, the Anthropopause itself when lockdowns sharply curtailed tourism and reduced agricultural intensity, and the post-Anthropopause recovery when visitors returned. By structuring the analysis this way, the researchers could isolate the signal of human pressure on the aquifer system with unusual clarity.

The methodological framework was deliberately comprehensive. Descriptive statistical analyses established the baseline characteristics of the water samples, while bivariate hydrogeochemical diagrams traced the relationships between key ions. Geo-environmental indices translated raw concentrations into interpretable measures of water quality and suitability for various uses, and thematic maps revealed how contamination patterns varied across the landscape. The ionic signatures told a consistent story: elevated electrical conductivity paired with high chloride and sodium concentrations pointed to seawater intrusion along the coast, while elevated nitrate levels flagged agricultural and other diffuse pollution sources inland.

The most striking result emerged from the temporal comparison. During the Anthropopause, the data showed significant reductions in nitrate, chloride, and electrical conductivity, indicating that groundwater quality genuinely improved when human pressures eased. This improvement was not uniform across all parameters, but the overall pattern suggested that the aquifer system responded relatively quickly to reduced loading and reduced abstraction. When tourism rebounded, however, groundwater conditions deteriorated once more, reversing many of the gains observed during the pause. The rebound effect is perhaps the most important finding, because it demonstrates that the improvements were not a permanent reset but a temporary reprieve contingent on continued restraint in human activity.

To move beyond description and toward actionable insight, the team coupled two established analytical frameworks: DPSIR and SWOT. The DPSIR framework, developed by the European Environment Agency, structures environmental problems as a causal chain of Driving forces, Pressures, States, Impacts, and Responses. In Messenia, the driving forces include agricultural intensification and tourism growth; the pressures are groundwater abstraction, fertilizer application, and wastewater discharge; the state is the observed chemical composition of the aquifer; the impacts are degraded water quality and salinization; and the responses range from European Union water policy to local management practices. Mapping the Anthropopause onto this chain revealed precisely where the pandemic pause intervened: it weakened the driving forces and pressures, which propagated through the system to improve the state of the groundwater.

The SWOT component, standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, complemented this causal analysis by evaluating the management capacity of the region. Strengths included the availability of monitoring data and the existence of European regulatory frameworks such as the Water Framework Directive. Weaknesses involved gaps in systematic spatiotemporal monitoring and the difficulty of enforcing abstraction limits in a landscape of thousands of private boreholes. Opportunities lay in the demonstrated responsiveness of the aquifer, which suggests that targeted management interventions could produce tangible improvements, while threats included climate change, which reduces recharge and intensifies both irrigation demand and seawater intrusion in the Mediterranean region.

The broader significance of the study extends well beyond the Peloponnese. Groundwater supplies a substantial share of the world’s drinking water and irrigated agriculture, yet it remains chronically under-monitored compared with surface waters. The Anthropopause offered a rare controlled comparison, and the Messenia results align with a growing body of literature documenting water quality improvements during lockdowns in rivers, lakes, and aquifers across the globe, from India to Turkey. What distinguishes the Greek study is its integration of hydrogeochemical evidence with structured policy frameworks, providing a template for how other regions might translate a one-time natural experiment into lasting management insight. The authors emphasize that the pause in human activities demonstrated significant effects on human-environment interactions, often benefiting natural processes.

Perhaps the most sobering implication is what the post-pandemic rebound reveals about the baseline. If groundwater quality deteriorated as soon as tourism recovered, then the pre-pandemic level of pressure was already exceeding what the aquifer system can sustainably absorb. The researchers argue that effective groundwater resource management requires systematic spatiotemporal monitoring of groundwater data to disentangle the impacts of human activities from those of climate change. Without such monitoring, the transient improvement of 2020 would have gone entirely unnoticed, and the region would lack the evidence base needed to justify interventions such as managed aquifer recharge, fertilizer optimization, or seasonal abstraction controls. The Anthropopause, in this sense, was not just a disruption but a diagnostic.

For Messenia, the path forward involves balancing the economic vitality that tourism and agriculture provide against the hydrogeological limits of a coastal Mediterranean aquifer. The study’s coupled DPSIR-SWOT approach offers a practical roadmap: identify the driving forces that can be moderated, target the pressures that most directly degrade water quality, track the state of the aquifer with consistent monitoring, and design responses that lock in the gains glimpsed during the pandemic pause. The episode demonstrated that aquifers can recover when given relief, but it also demonstrated how quickly that relief evaporates. As climate change tightens the squeeze on Mediterranean water resources, the lesson from this corner of Greece is that the health of hidden groundwater ultimately mirrors the intensity of the human activity above it, and that the choice of intensity remains, for now, in human hands.

Subject of Research: Anthropopause effects on coastal groundwater quality in Messenia, Greece, assessed through hydrogeochemistry and coupled DPSIR-SWOT analysis

Article Title: Anthropopause impacts on groundwater in the Messenia Regional Unit, SW Peloponnese, Greece: insights from hydrogeochemistry and coupled DPSIR-SWOT approaches

Article References: Theodoropoulou, M., Keramydas, N., Karatrantou, C., Gianni, E., Bolaji, T., & Papazotos, P. (2026). Anthropopause impacts on groundwater in the Messenia Regional Unit, SW Peloponnese, Greece: insights from hydrogeochemistry and coupled DPSIR-SWOT approaches. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 198(11), Article 1145. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-026-15999-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10661-026-15999-3

Keywords: groundwater, Anthropopause, COVID-19 lockdown, seawater intrusion, nitrate pollution, hydrogeochemistry, DPSIR framework, SWOT analysis, Messenia, Greece, tourism, water management