Three factors—spectacular images, a high death toll and strong personal ties—make it more likely that the media in one country will report on a natural disaster in another, according to a study by the University of Bonn, the University of Warwick and Imperial College London, which has now been published in the journal “Nature Human Behaviour.” The data also shows that droughts and flooding—two of the biggest effects of climate change—are considered particularly un-newsworthy, which could be one explanation for why many people are still underestimating the impact of the greenhouse effect.

This review synthesizes the global evolution of aquatic ecosystem health research and calls for a paradigm shift from isolated, indicator-based assessment to integrated, watershed-scale governance. Led by Qiuwen Chen from Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, the research team argues that aquatic ecosystem health must be understood as a coupled social–ecological and process-based property—linking ecological structure with hydrological and biogeochemical processes, socio-economic drivers, and adaptive governance—rather than as a simple aggregation of water-quality or biological metrics.