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Cholera, an acute waterborne diarrheal disease, remains a major global health challenge. Despite being curable and preventable, it can be fatal if left untreated, especially for children. Bangladesh, a cholera‐endemic country with a high disease burden, experiences two peaks annually, during the dry pre‐monsoon spring and the wet post‐monsoon fall seasons. An early warning system for disseminating cholera risk, which has potential to reduce the disease burden, currently does not exist in Bangladesh. Such systems can raise timely awareness and allow households in rural, riverine areas like Matlab to make behavioral adjustments with water usage and around water resources to reduce contracting and transmitting cholera. Current dissemination approaches typically target local government and public health organizations; however, the vulnerable rural populations largely remain outside the information chain. Here, we develop and evaluate the accuracy of an early warning system—CholeraMap that uses high‐resolution earth observations to forecast cholera risk and disseminate geocoded risk maps directly to Matlab's population via a mobile smartphone application. Instead of relying on difficult to obtain station‐based environmental and hydroclimatological data, this study offers a new opportunity to use remote sensing data sets for designing and operating a disease early warning system. CholeraMap delivers monthly, color‐coded geospatial maps (1 km × 1 km spatial resolution) with household and community cholera risk information. Our results demonstrate that the satellite‐derived local‐scale risk model satisfactorily captured the seasonal cholera pattern for the Matlab region, and a detailed high‐resolution picture of the spatial progression of at‐risk areas during outbreak months. Plain Language Summary: Cholera, an acute waterborne diarrheal disease, remains a major public health challenge in developing nations. An early warning system for disseminating cholera risk has the potential to reduce the disease burden in rural, riverine, and endemic countries like Bangladesh. Current dissemination approaches typically target local government and public health organizations but largely overlook the vulnerable rural populations. We develop and evaluate the accuracy of an early warning system—CholeraMap that uses satellite remote sensing data to forecast cholera risk and disseminate geocoded risk maps directly to the remote population of Matlab, Bangladesh via a mobile smartphone application. CholeraMap delivers monthly, color‐coded risk maps to provide users with household and community cholera risk information along with associated explanations of the risks. Our results satisfactorily captured the spatiotemporal progression of at‐risk areas during high outbreak months and were disseminated to the vulnerable population of Matlab via this novel smartphone application. Key Points: An early warning system for disseminating cholera risk has the potential to reduce disease burden in vulnerable endemic populationsThis study is the first attempt to combine satellite data sets and smartphone‐based dissemination for waterborne diarrheal disease applicationsCholeraMap captured the spatiotemporal patterns and high‐resolution view of the progression of cholera risk during outbreak months [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Watersheds require collective care and management at local and regional levels to maintain their ecological health. The Chesapeake Bay's last several decades of stagnantly poor ecological health presents a distinctive case study for explicating the challenges of motivating collective action across a diverse regional natural resource. Our study uses county- and individual-level descriptive analysis to examine interrelated framings of environmental quality, environmental sentiment, and political action at two critical moments in time—the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. We find that demographic, environmental, and political characteristics vary with distance to the Chesapeake Bay and that linked environmental and political characteristics appeared to become more polarized between 2016 and 2020. We found no evidence that local environmental quality influenced new political actions such as voting; however, people already likely to vote were influenced by their pro-environmental values such as priorities around climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water resources can play significant roles in development pathways for water-endowed, low-income countries like Nepal. This article describes three visions for water resource development in the Karnali and Mahakali Basins of Western Nepal: state-led development, demand-driven development and preservation of ecosystem integrity. The analysis calls attention to water use trade-offs, including those resulting from national priorities such as infrastructure-based hydropower and irrigation, from local drinking water demand, and from environmental conservation concerns. While these visions of water resources development do diverge, common trends appear, including acknowledgment of water management's role in expanding energy access and increasing agricultural productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of climate in water resources management is well recognized, but less is known about how climate affects water access at the household level. Understanding this is crucial for identifying vulnerable households, reducing health and well-being risks, and finding equitable solutions. Using difference-in-differences regression analyses and relying on temporal variation in interview timing from multiple, cross-sectional surveys, we examine the effects of monsoon riverine flooding on household water access among 34 000 households in Bangladesh in 2011 and 2014. We compare water access, a combined measure of both water source and time for collection, among households living in flood-affected and non-flood-affected districts before and after monsoon flooding events. We find that households in monsoon flood-affected districts surveyed after the flooding had between 2.27 and 4.42 times higher odds of experiencing low water access. Separating geographically, we find that while households in coastal districts have lower water access than those in non-coastal districts, monsoon flood exposure is a stronger predictor of low water access in non-coastal districts. Non-coastal districts were particularly burdened in 2014, when households affected by monsoon flooding had 4.71 times higher odds of low water access. We also find that household wealth is a consistent predictor of household water access. Overall, our results show that monsoon flooding is associated with a higher prevalence of low water access; socioeconomically vulnerable households are especially burdened., Competing Interests: This work was conducted with publicly available data., (© 2024 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.)