Carnegie Institution for Science
Carnegie Institution for Science is a research center that is part of the pulse of the water sector. Here we bring together everything it publishes on Smart Water Magazine: its news, its blogs and the events it takes part in.
Gap between water supply and demand will increase as climate shifts
Water is necessary for life. It's also tremendously important for food and energy security and ecosystem health. Despite this, many people live in areas that experience water scarcity at least one month out of the year.
Sustainable irrigation critical to recovery of Ukrainian farms
By the middle of the century, three-quarters of Ukrainian croplands—a critical source of the world's grain and oilseeds—will experience water shortages due to the combination of climate change and infrastructural damage caused by the Russian invasion, according to new research from an international research team led by Carnegie Science's Lorenzo Rosa and including members of […]
Climate is increasing risk of high toxin concentrations in Northern U.S. lakes
When we think about water sustainability in the context of global change, we need to focus on the quality of the water as much as we focus on the amount of water.
Predicting the sustainability of a future hydrogen economy
As renewable energy sources like wind and solar ramp up, they can be used to sustainably generate hydrogen fuel. But implementing such a strategy on a large scale requires land and water dedicated to this purpose. Recent research in Nature Communications led by Carnegie’s Lorenzo Rosa and visiting scholar Davide Tonelli from ULB and UC Louvain […]
Nitrogen runoff strategies complicated by climate change
Although the impacts of climate change-induced shifts in precipitation patterns have been explored, the effect of temperature increases on the movement of nitrogen into rivers has not been quantified at continental scales until now.
How did Earth get its water?
Exoplanet discoveries inform new model that could explain the origin of some of Earth's signature features, such as its abundance of water.
Sustainable irrigation can feed billions, make agriculture resilient to climate change
As climate change shifts precipitation patterns, irrigation can be a powerful tool for increasing the world’s food supply—feeding more than a billion additional people without converting natural spaces into farmland, according to a new study by Carnegie’s Lorenzo Rosa published in Environmental Research Letters. “Population trends indicate that we will need to double global food production […]
Would a deep-earth water cycle change how we understand planetary evolution?
Every school child learns about the water cycle—evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and collection. But what if there were a deep Earth component of this process happening on geologic timescales that makes our planet ideal for sustaining life as we know it? New work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Carnegie’s Yanhao Lin and […]
Lakes worldwide are experiencing more-severe algal blooms
The intensity of summer algal blooms has increased over the past three decades, according to a first-ever global survey of dozens of large, freshwater lakes, which was conducted by Carnegie’s Jeff Ho and Anna Michalak and NASA’s Nima Pahlevan and published by Nature. Reports of harmful algal blooms—like the ones that shut down Toledo’s water supply in […]