• Energy Research

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.