Potential eco-friendly techniques for water, soil, and waste management

Soil, water, and wastes are three major environmental resources confronting a big challenge to manage by using appropriate approaches to feed the one-in-seven person who still goes to bed with an empty stomach. Global climate change and food security are two major environmental issues, emerging day by day all over the world. Global climate change is caused by both biotic and abiotic factors such as volcanic eruption, plate tectonics, fluctuations in solar radiations, and anthropogenic activities like urbanization and industrialization. Climate change has become a serious issue for managing and sustaining life on earth, influencing ecosystems’ biodiversity, structure, and function. The components of the earth like land, ocean, and the planet’s natural cycles are in a state of dynamic equilibrium. With increasing global climate change, urbanization, and population growth, the earth’s equilibrium is disturbing continuously. The excessive use of water for irrigation, utilization of soil for agriculture industrialization, and dumping of wastes discharged from industries due to human activities contribute to the reduction of these resources. The soil is a vital part of the land. It provides a range of ecosystem services that are necessary for maintaining the biodiversity and productivity of terrestrial ecosystems as well as many important ecological functions. Several approaches have been established to manage water-soil-waste resources, but the most efficient and cost-effective approach used worldwide to manage and shape these three environmental resources is the nexus approach. This approach could be helpful in the future to reduce the impact of global change. The nexus approach is a complex series of interconnected and integral management of more than one resource at a time to maximize synergies and reduce trade-offs that obtain the most reliable results for the concerned environmental issues. The presented book chapter focuses on key aspects of environmental management and the nexus approach.