• Energy Research

We synthesized a global inventory of cryosphere degradation-driven increases in erosion and sediment yield, e.g., suspended load, bedload, particulate organic carbon, and riverbank/slope erosion. This inventory includes 76 locations from the high Arctic, European mountains, High Mountain Asia and Andes, and 18 Arctic permafrost-coastal sites, and they were collected from ~80 studies.

Abstract. Deposition and accumulation of light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosol on glacier surfaces can alter the energy balance of glaciers. In this study, 2 years (December 2014 to December 2016) of continuous observations of carbonaceous aerosols in the glacierized region of the Mt. Yulong and Ganhaizi (GHZ) basin are analyzed. The average elemental carbon (EC) and organic carbon (OC) concentrations were 1.51±0.93 and 2.57±1.32 µg m−3, respectively. Although the annual mean OC ∕ EC ratio was 2.45±1.96, monthly mean EC concentrations during the post-monsoon season were even higher than OC in the high altitudes (approximately 5000 ma.s.l.) of Mt. Yulong. Strong photochemical reactions and local tourism activities were likely the main factors inducing high OC ∕ EC ratios in the Mt. Yulong region during the monsoon season. The mean mass absorption efficiency (MAE) of EC, measured for the first time in Mt. Yulong, at 632 nm with a thermal-optical carbon analyzer using the filter-based method, was 6.82±0.73 m2 g−1, comparable with the results from other studies. Strong seasonal and spatial variations of EC MAE were largely related to the OC abundance. Source attribution analysis using a global aerosol–climate model, equipped with a black carbon (BC) source tagging technique, suggests that East Asia emissions, including local sources, have the dominant contribution (over 50 %) to annual mean near-surface BC in the Mt. Yulong area. There is also a strong seasonal variation in the regional source apportionment. South Asia has the largest contribution to near-surface BC during the pre-monsoon season, while East Asia dominates the monsoon season and post-monsoon season. Results in this study have great implications for accurately evaluating the influences of carbonaceous matter on glacial melting and water resource supply in glacierization areas.

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have substantially contributed to intensification of heavy precipitation and thus the risk of flood occurrence, and this anthropogenic climate change is now likely to continue for many centuries. Thus, precise quantification of human-induced GHG emissions is urgently required for modeling future global warming and precipitation changes, which is strongly linked to flood disasters. Recently, GHG evasion from hydroelectric reservoirs was estimated to be 48 Tg C as CO2 and 3 Tg C as CH4 annually, lower than earlier estimate (published in Nature Geoscience; 2011). Here, we analyzed the uncertainties of GHG emissions from hydroelectric reservoirs, that is, reservoir surface area, data paucity and carbon emission relating to ecological zone, and argued that GHG evasion from global hydroelectric reservoirs has been largely under-estimated. Our study hopes to improve the quantification for future researches.

Hydropower, although an attractive renewable energy source, can alter the flux of water, sediments, and biota, producing detrimental impacts in downstream regions. The Mekong River illustrates the impacts of large dams and the limitations of conventional dam regulating strategies. Even under the most optimistic sluicing scenario, sediment load at the Mekong Delta could only recover to 62.3 ± 8.2 million tonnes (1 million tonnes = 10 9 kilograms), short of the (100 to 160)–million tonne historical level. Furthermore, unless retrofit to reroute sediments, the dams are doomed to continue trapping sediment for at least 170 years and thus starve downstream reaches of sediment, contributing to the impending disappearance of the Mekong Delta. Therefore, we explicitly challenge the widespread use of large dead storages—the portion of the reservoirs that cannot be emptied—in dam designs. Smaller dead storages can ease sediment starvation in downstream regions, thereby buffering against sinking deltas or relative sea level rises.

Abstract. Human activities are drastically altering water and material flows in river systems across Asia. These anthropogenic perturbations have rarely been linked to the carbon (C) fluxes of Asian rivers that may account for up to 40–50 % of the global fluxes. The primary object of this review was to provide a conceptual framework for assessing human impacts on Asian river C fluxes, along with a latest update on anthropogenic alterations of riverine C fluxes, focusing on the impacts of water pollution and river impoundments on CO2 outgassing from the rivers draining South, Southeast, and East Asian regions that account for the largest fraction of river discharge and C exports from Asia and Oceania. Recent booms in dam construction across Asia have created a host of environmental problems; yet only a small number of studies have explicitly investigated altered rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and organic C transport. There have been contrasting reports on impoundment effects: decreases in GHG emissions in the reservoirs exhibiting enhanced primary production vs. increased emissions from the flooded vegetation and soils in the early years following dam construction or from the impounded river reaches and downstream estuaries during the monsoon period. These contrasting results suggest that the rates of metabolic processes in the impounded and downstream reaches can greatly vary longitudinally over time, as a combined result of diel shifts in the balance between autotrophy and heterotrophy, seasonal fluctuations between the dry and monsoon periods, and a long-term change from a leaky post-construction phase to a gradual C sink. Rapid pace of urbanization across southern and eastern Asian regions has dramatically increased municipal water withdrawal, generating annually 120.2 km3 of wastewater in 24 countries, which comprises 38.6 % of the global municipal wastewater production (311.6 km3). Although the municipal wastewater constitutes only 0.9 % of the renewable surface water, it can disproportionately affect the receiving river water, particularly downstream of rapidly expanding metropolitan areas, including eutrophication, increases in the amount and lability of organic C, and pulse emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). As reviewed for three representative rivers (the Ganges, Mekong, and Yellow River), the lower reaches of these rivers and their polluted tributaries tend to exhibit higher levels of organic C and the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) than the eutrophic reservoirs and less impacted upstream reaches. More field measurements of pCO2, together with accurate flux calculations based on river-specific model parameters, are urgently required to provide more accurate estimates of GHG emissions from the Asian rivers that are now underrepresented in the global C budgets. Researchers working on individual river systems need to be linked to collaborative research networks to facilitate global synthesis of local field data. These synthesis efforts, combined with conceptual and mathematical models, will contribute to a better understanding of how anthropogenic perturbations in rapidly urbanizing watersheds across Asia and other continents enhance discontinuities in riverine metabolic processes and C fluxes and hence transform the natural river assumed in the long-standing river continuum model to an anthropogenic system.