Research on Environment and Economic Development

The special collection on Research on Environment and Economic Development is available in the ASCE Library (https://ascelibrary.org/page/joeedu/environment_economic_development).

The urban growth on the banks or in the surroundings of aquatic ecosystems causes degradation of water quality, causing significant damage to the aquatic community and public health. The misuse of soil and rapid and chaotic urbanization are the primary causes of the degradation of natural resources, generating losses not only by hydrological changes, but also by the load of pollutants leached or carried with sediments (Fernandes and Poleto 2017).

The availability of the contaminants present in the sediments is due to the chemical, physical, and biological processes that can lead to their release into the water column and cause risks and/or damages to the local ecosystem owing to their capacity to accumulate in sediments over time. Sediments have been used as important indicators of the quality of aquatic ecosystems and are currently considered as important as water column samplings in environmental assessments (Chapman and Mann 1999; Linkov et al. 2001; Pacifico et al. 2007; Zang et al. 2017).

Aquatic ecosystems are among the natural environments most affected by anthropogenic activities, especially those located near urban, agricultural, and industrial areas. The contamination of sediments by anthropogenic metals remains a problem in contemporary societies because most of these nondegradable pollutants accumulate in chemical species, often more reactive than the original forms of these elements (Adriano et al. 2004; Rodríguez-Seijo et al. 2017).

But there are many phenomena that have generated changes in our systems; whether they are hydrological changes, climate, vegetation composition, etc., all are interrelated. According to Beier et al. (2016), it is possible to mention the characters responsible for such changes that result in an environmental, social, and economic imbalance, and alternatives for the process to be attenuated or mitigated are suggested.

Thus, this special collection seeks to show different aspects of the same problem, the environmental problems that have been occurring throughout the planet.