Special series on Water and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Call for papers and invitation to join our synthetic effort and debate on Water and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Submit hereRead the articles here

UCL Open: Environment is opening a call for papers concerned with the theme of Water and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Water is one of the Earth’s most distinguishing features. It is essential to life. It is a fundamental part of our society and economy. We need it to drink, to supply food from land and sea, and support businesses of many kinds. We need water to help make things and to help deal with waste. And we need water for our environment. In our world there are tensions between all these different uses of water that are not always being addressed. Water shortages could be made worse with our changing climate leading to more frequent or even more severe droughts. Likewise, flooding could become worse because of increased periods of intense rainfall or because a combination of factors to which sea-level rise (driven by ocean expansion and polar melt) will add makes coastal erosion and flooding that much more of an issue.

So how do we move on from the position we have now where some people and environments are facing water scarcity and others, periodically, facing floods, some of which are devastating; a position where others lack the water or the systems they need to ensure sanitation standards are high enough to avoid disease; and a position where there is no agreed way to balance the competing demands for water other than by perhaps sometimes attempting to trade-off between competing needs.

Submission is open to anyone and submissions may be research articles directly concerned with one or a combination of the SDGs relevant to the uses of water interaction or form a nexi with those Environment focused SDGs that in a sense host the sources of water on the planet (SDGs 6, 13, 14 and 15). Submissions covering an examination of progress on all these SDGs viewed from the perspective of the global water cycle and whether the indicators and targets and evidence available to us all /deliver a more balanced view of water and how it might be best managed in future, are also welcomed for submission.

Submission

Submission is open to anyone and authors can submit until December 2023. If you would like to contribute to the evidence on this open debate please send in your submissions for publication as soon as you wish (here). The series will focus on SDGs 6, 13, 14 and 15 but submissions on other SDGs are also welcome if they address a water topic.

For more information or to enquire about submission, please contact the Editors at uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk

Authors should read through the journals author guidelines and publishing policies before submitting. Once you are ready to submit, please ensure that you have signed into MyScienceOpen with your ORCID ID.

UCL Press offers waivers and discounts for Article-Processing Charges (APCs) including for articles whose corresponding authors are based in low-income countries (see here for more information). Authors are requested to contact the Editorial office (uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk) prior to submission to enquire and request these discounts. Please note that authors ability to pay any charges regarding to publication are kept separate to editorial review and Editors are not responsible for determining these waivers and discounts.

Note about data

Prior to submission, all authors should ensure that the data relied upon for the paper are either deposited in publicly available repositories (for example, such as GenBank, TreeBASE, Dryad, the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity or other suitable long-term and stable public repositories, see below notice on data repositories) whenever possible, or have included in the main text for open peer review.

For further information, including about FAIR data sharing, UCL have prepared some useful information about when, where, and how to share data as openly as possible, here https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/research-support/research-data-management/best-practices/how-guides/sharing-data.

General repositories – for all types of research data (such as Figshare) – may be used where appropriate. UCL authors are encouraged to use the UCL Research Data Repository (please see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/research-support/research-data-management/ucl-research-data-repository)

Editorial article

The following editorial article by the Series Editors provides further context for this call:

Water and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Authors: Dr Luiza Campos, Prof Daniel Olago, Prof Dan Osborn
Published: 12 January 2022

Series Editors

Dr Luiza CamposAssociate Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, UCL, UK
Prof Daniel Olago, Department of Geology, University of Nairobi, Kenya
Prof Dan OsbornChair of Human Ecology, Earth Sciences, UCL, UK

Read the articles

All articles will appear in the article list as and when they are submitted and subsequently officially published after open peer review. Articles will firstly appear as preprint articles whilst under open peer review being updated when revised by the authors as requested by the series Editors.

w

Review for us

If you are interested in contributing to this special series as a potential reviewer, please contact the series Editors with a brief outline of your interest and area of expertise, to uclopen.environment@ucl.ac.uk

How it works

Operating dually as an open access e-journal and offering immediate publication in a dedicated preprint server, with open peer review, the entire publishing process will be accessible, transparent and accountable.