Managing freshwater resources sustainably under future climatic and hydrological uncertainty poses novel challenges. Rehabilitation of ageing infrastructure and construction of new dams are widely viewed as solutions to diminish climate risk, but attaining the broad goal of freshwater sustainability will require expansion of the prevailing water resources management paradigm beyond narrow economic criteria to include socially valued ecosystem functions and services.

Cryptosporidium is a protozoan parasite that can cause diarrhoea. Human faeces are an important source of Cryptosporidium in surface waters. We present a model to study the impact of sanitation, urbanization and population growth on human emissions of Cryptosporidium to surface waters. We build on a global model by Hofstra et al and zoom into Bangladesh and India as illustrative case studies.

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The Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 (GBD 2013) aims to bring together all available epidemiological data using a coherent measurement framework, standardised estimation methods, and transparent data sources to enable comparisons of health loss over time and across causes, age–sex groups, and countries. The GBD can be used to generate summary measures such as disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) and healthy life expectancy (HALE) that make possible comparative assessments of broad epidemiological patterns across countries and time.

Extreme heat events are likely to become more frequent in the coming decades owing to climate change. Exposure to extreme heat depends not only on changing climate, but also on changes in the size and spatial distribution of the human population. Here we provide a new projection of population exposure to extreme heat for the continental United States that takes into account both of these factors.

East–Southeast Asia is currently one of the fastest urbanizing regions in the world, with countries such as China climbing from 20 to 50% urbanized in just a few decades. By 2050, these countries are projected to add 1 billion people, with 90% of that growth occurring in cities. This population shift parallels an equally astounding amount of built-up land expansion.

Coastal managers face the task of assessing and managing flood risk. This requires knowledge of the area of land, the number of people, properties and other infrastructure
potentially affected by floods. Such analyses are usually static; i.e. they only consider a snapshot of the current situation. This misses the opportunity to learn about the role
of key drivers of historical changes in flood risk, such as development and population rise in the coastal flood plain and sea-level rise.