Mitigating inland waters’ greenhouse gas emissions: current insights and prospects

Abstract

Natural and human-made inland waters emit globally significant amounts of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) into the atmosphere. As a result of human-induced alterations in the landscape these emissions tend to increase. While proper management of water bodies is fundamental to reaching the global sustainable development goals as well as the Paris Agreement, insights on climate-smart inland water management are still underexplored. Here we review and discuss physical, chemical, and biological management measures applied in a wide range of inland waters to: i) reduce external loads of compounds fueling aquatic GHG emissions, ii) reduce the aquatic production of GHG-fueling compounds, and iii) minimize GHG production and stimulate GHG consumption. Some measures are well studied and others are in the exploration phase, resulting in a varying degree of confidence with respect to their effectiveness. Climate-smart water management – e.g., through the reduction of organic matter and nutrient loading – generally not only reduces GHG production and emission but also improves the ecological state of aquatic environments. The climate-smart measures discussed here can reduce local aquatic GHG emissions up to 4 times. Certainly, the global effect of the different measures also depends on the scale they can be applied Depending on the local context, one or more of these measures can be considered to be implemented in a GHG mitigation program.

Keywords:

• Freshwater ecosystems
• Mitigation
• Greenhouse gases
• Climate change

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Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NWO-TTW project under grant n⁰ 18661; NWO-VIDI under grant n⁰ 203.098.