Olli Varis

Water plays a critical role in sustaining civilian populations during armed conflict, yet its deliberate disruption is increasingly reported in contemporary warfare. Despite growing attention to the topic of water weaponization, the concept remains inconsistently defined throughout humanitarian, environmental, and legal literature. This study examines existing conceptualizations of water weaponization and combines them into a broader analytical framework that considers any actions that impair the availability, quality, or accessibility of water for civilian populations as weaponization of water. Using this framework, the study analyzes documented cases from the Russian war in Ukraine and evaluates the limitations of existing international legal mechanisms intended to protect water during armed conflict. The discussion is built on a combination of a scoping literature review and semi‐structured expert interviews. The findings demonstrate that water weaponization extends beyond direct attacks on hydraulic infrastructure and water supply systems, or conflict‐related water pollution. Instead, many consequences arise through indirect impacts and interconnected infrastructure systems. Disruptions to energy, industrial, and water sectors amplify humanitarian and environmental risks that exceed their immediate military significance. The study also reveals persistent challenges in evidence collection, attribution of responsibility, environmental monitoring, and enforcement of existing international legal protections in active conflict settings. By linking empirical evidence from Ukraine with broader debates on water security and conflict, the study contributes to ongoing efforts to clarify the scope of water weaponization and calls for the need to strengthen approaches for assessing water‐related harms during warfare.

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, frontline competencies are undeniably valuable. Higher education aspires to be at the forefront and to push new frontiers. At the same time, global challenges are becoming more complex and harder to understand and address. This comment prompts to the importance of entrepreneurial mindset of engineering graduates in transferring the vanguard competencies to successful solutions.

The assessment of flood risk is crucial for sustainable planning, policymaking, and emergency management. Even with recent methodological advancements, flood risk assessment in data‐scarce regions still encounters significant uncertainties. Despite the multitude of available methods and data sources, no context‐specific guidance exists for selecting a suitable combination of methods to map risk in a given data‐scarce area of interest. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic review of 264 studies on flood risk assessment in data‐scarce regions. First, our study reveals diverse interpretations of “risk” and “data scarcity”, deviating from well‐established definitions. We highlight the use of a standardized definition of flood risk to enhance the comparability of findings and improve the reliability of assessments. Second, we conceptualize data scarcity in the flood risk context to support an informed selection of assessment methods. Third, we systematically compile risk indicators, methods, and data sources applied in the context of data scarcity, and we analyze the interplay between methods for mapping the three key risk components, that is, hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. This interplay enables the design of a three‐step approach for identifying an appropriate methodological combination for flood risk assessment in any data‐scarce application context. Through these three key contributions, our review paves the way for more reliable and consistent flood risk assessment and management in data‐scarce regions, facilitating the reduction and mitigation of flood impacts in vulnerable communities across the globe. This article is categorized under: Science of Water > Water Extremes Engineering Water > Planning Water

Household consumption typically constitutes ~60% of a country’s GDP, yet only a few cross-country comparisons are available for it. Our correlation analyses of 2020 data indicate that geographic region, welfare indicators (HDI, its components, and gender equality), and the cultural dimension of individualism–collectivism are strongly associated with consumption patterns. The cultural dimension of flexibility–monumentalism performs more modestly. As HDI, gender equality, and individualism increase, spending on food, education, and communication declines, while spending on housing and leisure rises. The findings suggest that initiatives targeting consumption should consider both the welfare constituents as well as the cultural values of a country. Given the significant environmental impacts of household consumption, holistically addressing these sociocultural drivers is crucial for advancing the global sustainability transition.

Water resource management in Africa is under increasing pressure due to multiple factors, including rapid population growth, fast economic transformations, accelerating climate change, soaring pressure on ecosystems, and uprising political instability, all of which increase the vulnerability to water risks. Africa is now at a critical turning point where a new framework is needed to assess water risks. Multi-risk assessment can provide a more holistic understanding of how multiple hazards are interrelated to exposure and vulnerability. Currently, water risk assessment in Africa is still predominantly hazard-specific and sectorally fragmented. Systematic and continental-scale analyses that integrate multiple water-related risks across Africa remain limited. In this study, we conducted a continental-scale assessment to evaluate population exposure and vulnerability across African countries and major basins to eight water-related stressors: lack of drinking water, poor sanitation, droughts, overuse of water, floods, loss of groundwater, water pollution from nutrients, and organic pollution. To maximize policy compatibility and interlink different water risks to prevent unintended consequences, this analysis utilizes gridded high-resolution geospatial data and employs the multiplicative risk scheme of the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and IPCC (risk = stress x exposure x vulnerability). By using statistical analysis, we identify high-risk regions and reveal spatial patterns in water stressors, vulnerability, and exposure. These regions are characterized by the convergence of high population density, low human development, and fragile governance. Our findings highlight the pressing need for integrated, regionally targeted policies and strategies that consider both biophysical stressors and socio-political vulnerability, providing a transferable framework for guiding future water policy and decision-making and supporting transboundary cooperation efforts across the continent.

Writing scientific papers is a key skill for researchers, and increasingly also for professionals in geoscience and engineering. It is very time-intensive and challenging, especially for PhD candidates or master's students doing it for the first time. In interdisciplinary contexts, the process can be tough even for seasoned professionals. Courses and other resources on academic writing help, but they might leave the actual process – from ideation and data collection to editing and publishing – quite unfamiliar. Some educators have made losing the research paper virginity easier by facilitating co-writing of real-life papers together in short timeframes through courses or workshops. This process can be a win-win for everyone involved: academic staff can finally develop that lingering research idea into a paper with the help of others, and early-career researchers can complete the usually daunting first paper much earlier than they otherwise would. Additionally, scientific writing and incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives becomes much easier once you have experienced the process once. Unfortunately, scientific works or other materials on such hands-on writing processes are difficult to find. In this presentation, we hope to showcase one way of facilitating such a student co-writing process from start to finish. This process was piloted as part of Aalto University’s Sustainable Global Technologies Studio course in 2024, where multidisciplinary master’s student teams tackle real-life problem-based learning cases with the help of mentors and stakeholders. As part of this course, students travel abroad to work on their case. In this instance, students explored a small Mexican artisan village, studying artisan practices and changes in their environment that impact their livelihood. After returning to Finland, the mentor facilitated a systematic writing process to produce a qualitative academic paper on the students’ work. In short, the team first analyzed the interview data with a coding guide, wrote results into representative sections guided by academic frameworks, and after lengthy albeit educative editing, the paper was submitted to a journal. The initial five weeks during which students participated in the writing worked well, and progress was speedy. This intense writing process with clear responsibility division, weekly deadlines, and progress meetings yielded the desired outcome – an article draft. Finalizing the paper took longer than expected, but the paper was submitted at the end of 2025. Here, we hope to present one way of facilitating such a process and discuss the lessons learned. Our experience is that such a systematic approach has high potential to effectively teach both master’s and PhD students about scientific writing and to produce interdisciplinary papers effectively in different kinds of teams. Furthermore, our experience illustrates the potential of project courses in generating impactful outcomes beyond the course itself, which can be of interest for educators interested in practical approaches that deepen the professional relevance of such courses.

Climate change, in combination with evolving development pathways, is contributing to increasing disaster risks globally. Understanding these risks requires the assessment of risk components, i.e., hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Among them, social vulnerability is particularly challenging to assess due to its dynamic nature and the limited data availability in resource-constrained, high-risk countries for instance, Nepal. Existing studies in such regions often utilize open-source census data to assess vulnerability using a composite vulnerability index, but overlook spatio-temporal shifts in vulnerability and its components.To address this gap, our study explores spatio-temporal disaster vulnerability in Nepal by applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to municipal-level population census data of 2011 and 2021. We applied PCA separately to individual vulnerability components of both years to identify changes in explanatory indicators. Then, we illustrate disaster vulnerability across Nepal for 2011 and 2021 and assess how it has changed over the decade. Finally, we investigate changes in central vulnerability components, namely, sensitivity and adaptive capacity.The PCA reveals both continuity and transformation of drivers of sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Migration and literacy newly emerged in 2021 as principal components in sensitivity, while housing ownership and quality, as well as access to electricity, emerged in adaptive capacity. Overall, we observe a slight increase in the aggregated national vulnerability score, with approximately 45% of municipalities exhibiting high vulnerability classes in 2021. Most urban metropolitan cities and lowland regions (Terai) exhibit increased vulnerability, whereas Far Western regions witnessed a slight decrease in their vulnerability levels. A closer look at the shifts in sensitivity and adaptive capacity reveals that the increase in overall vulnerability was largely driven by a strong decrease in adaptive capacity in metropolitan cities and increased sensitivity in Terai regions. These findings suggest that focusing solely on composite vulnerability might lead to misguided mitigation strategies and that dissecting vulnerability into sensitivity and adaptive capacity offers actionable insights for decision-making. Furthermore, our approach supports multi-hazard risk and impact assessments in data-limited settings.By investigating the temporal and spatial changes in vulnerability components, our study enhances the understanding of vulnerability dynamics in Nepal over the past decade, developing a refined approach for spatio-temporal index-based vulnerability assessments. To illustrate the potential applications of the findings in disaster risk management, we explored sectoral vulnerability interventions through key informant interviews with relevant authorities. Furthermore, our vulnerability assessment is being employed in a flood impact model that aims to identify the main drivers for reported flood fatalities in Nepal.