Urban flood adaptation partnerships are increasingly promoted across the Global South as inclusive and collaborative responses to climate risk. Yet their proliferation has often obscured a more uncomfortable reality that many partnerships perform participation without redistributing authority, recognise community knowledge without granting it epistemic weight, and invoke justice without institutionalising accountability. This paper argues that the persistent gap between justice discourse and adaptation practice arises because partnerships are too often treated as inherently progressive governance forms rather than as institutional arrangements whose justice capacity is conditional. To address this problem, the paper develops an integrated Adaptive Justice–Institutional Fit (AJI–Fit) Lens that brings together the normative demands of adaptive justice with the enabling conditions of institutional fit. The framework links five justice dimensions (power redistribution, epistemic justice, distributional equity, reflexive learning, and multi-directional accountability) to three institutional conditions: structural, relational, and cultural fit. The paper shows that transformative partnerships emerge only when justice claims are institutionally enabled, while tokenism, elite capture, and technocratic dominance signal distinct forms of institutional misfit. In advancing this argument, the paper reconceptualises partnerships as contested infrastructures of governance and offers a diagnostic framework for designing urban flood adaptation that is more accountable, inclusive, and transformative.
This article examines how fragmented and misaligned infrastructures in informal settlements produce enduring forms of water injustice. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Film Nagar Basti, Hyderabad, it develops the concept of out-of-sync infrastructure to describe how multiple systems (water, drainage, electricity, and waste) operate on disconnected temporal logics. These mismatches reflect deep-rooted patterns of uneven urban governance. As infrastructures operate in conflict or contradiction, residents are drawn into continuous adaptive management such as queuing for water at night, coping with sewage overflows, and improvising during power cuts and floods.The article foregrounds the gendered and embodied labour required to navigate these everyday breakdowns. Women, in particular, shoulder the burden of adjusting routines, protecting children from contaminated water, and absorbing the emotional and physical toll of infrastructural uncertainty. Water insecurity, in this context, is embedded within a wider ecology of neglect, territorial stigma, and piecemeal governance. Rather than attributing water injustice to scarcity or policy failure, the article argues that temporally misaligned infrastructures produce risk as a routine condition of urban life.
Water scarcity is intensifying in rainfed and semi-arid agricultural regions, where increasing water demand and climate variability threaten food production and rural livelihoods. In this context, decentralized water storage systems, particularly Rainwater Harvesting (RWH), have emerged as key strategies for agricultural water security. However, the current literature remains fragmented, prioritizing hydrological performance over agricultural, socioeconomic, and long-term system perspectives. This systematic review critically assesses the role of RWH systems in agricultural water security. The review follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA 2020) protocol to ensure transparency and reproducibility and applies the Methodi Ordinatio to rank studies. A total of 22 peer-reviewed articles from the Scopus, ScienceDirect, and SciELO databases were analyzed. The results indicate that RWH contribute to increased water availability, and increased agricultural productivity. The RWH systems allow for greater crop intensity and reduce vulnerability to intra-seasonal climate variability. Despite these benefits, significant gaps remain in the literature such as limited socioeconomic integration, a lack of participatory approaches, and an absence of long-term evaluations. However, only 9 studies explicitly evaluated livelihood outcomes, and 11 conducted a limited socioeconomic analysis. The results suggest that the contribution of RWH systems to water security cannot be fully understood solely through technical indicators. Integrated approaches combining hydrological, agronomic, and socioeconomic perspectives are necessary. This study proposes a research agenda focused on interdisciplinary methods, participatory frameworks, and long-term systemic analyses to strengthen agricultural resilience in the face of increasing water scarcity.
Challenges in the Koshi River basin include a cascading multi-hazard environment as well as climate change and variability, while opportunities include possibilities for harnessing water resources for agriculture, energy, and navigation. Upstream-downstream linkages within countries and across borders play an important role in addressing both challenges and opportunities. To address these challenges and benefit from the opportunities, there is a need for cooperation among the stakeholders in the basin, particularly across borders. The focus of this paper is on transboundary cooperation in building infrastructure and institutions for flood risk management. This paper reviews and analyses existing institutional mechanisms for transboundary cooperation in the Koshi basin utilizing Ostrom's framework of design principles and uses the lessons learned to suggest a way forward. It also reviews mechanisms on the Gandak and Mahakali rivers for analysing the changes over time.
Scholarship on water security and just transitions recognise that "decentralised" and community-managed water supplies are governed through everyday labour, coordination, and place-based knowledge; yet policy and regulation still treat these systems as technical units subject to risk and compliance monitoring. While research on socio-technical water infrastructures, small-systems governance, and water justice is well developed, it has rarely been brought together to explore the relationship between misrecognition and current governance processes and why this matters for equity and climate resilience in global north rural settings. This article fills that gap by reconceptualising Scotland's rural and island private water supplies as community-managed institutions whose collective governance work is currently systematically rendered administratively illegible. The mechanism of such marginalisation is a form of institutional misrecognition: A failure of nested governance to grant them standing, with material consequences for justice and resilience. Drawing on extensive field research across rural and island Scotland, we present two illustrative cases (fictionalised but grounded in real-world data) alongside document and policy analysis of regulatory reporting and guidance to examine how responsibilities, burdens, and vulnerabilities are distributed. We argue that misrecognition is not simply symbolic neglect: It is a classificatory and organisational condition that obscures institutional labour and reallocates accountability and adaptation demand onto communities, producing patterned injustice that intensifies under climate-driven hydrological disruption. This matters because private water supplies underpin everyday life for tens of thousands of people and will face escalating climate stress. As such, achieving climate-resilient and just water governance will require not only technical interventions or institutional reform, but new interfaces, expectations, and resourcing pathways that enable nested governance to support institutional diversity without forcing premature standardisation.
Water security is increasingly framed as a governance challenge spanning water, energy, and climate change (WEC) priorities across fragmented institutional landscapes. In transboundary basins such as the Mekong River Basin, coordination unfolds under conditions of dispersed authority, power asymmetry, and technocratic policy-making. Within this terrain, trust is frequently invoked as essential to cooperation—yet actors who invoke it often mean different, even incompatible, things by it, a plurality this paper treats as a puzzle rather than an inconsistency to resolve. Drawing on a situational analysis of a regional WEC policy forum in the Mekong, treated as an illustrative rather than representative case, the paper reads trust as a boundary object: a travelling vocabulary stable enough to anchor coordination across actors while remaining open to divergent local meanings. It then traces the boundary work through which that vocabulary is continuously produced and contested. The findings show that trust operated as negotiated credibility, as a scale-contingent practice, and as a political strategy. Across these patterns, trust enabled coordination under informality without resolving the structural asymmetries it operated within, clarifying both its enabling and its bounded role in contemporary water security governance.
The Asian Water Tower (AWT), encompassing the Hindu Kush Himalaya, Tibetan Plateau, and surrounding regions, supports the livelihoods of 1.9 billion people in eleven major river systems that it feeds, but now faces intensifying pressures from accelerating hydropower development and climate change. This structured review examines how these coupled systems create water security vulnerabilities across transboundary basins in the AWT, with a focus on the Nepal-Bhutan-Tibet corridor. Over 1100 hydropower projects now intersect with accelerating warming (0.44 °C per decade), increased glacier mass loss, and rapid hydrological regime shifts. These intersections generate double-exposure, where communities and infrastructure systems face simultaneous pressures from engineered flows and hydroclimatic changes. Further, infrastructure systems designed for 50–100 years confront temporal mismatches as peak watertiming varies largely among different AWT basins, creating stranded asset risks. Governance arrangements critically mediate adaptive capacity, with Bhutan's cooperative model enabling coordinated responses, Nepal-India arrangements showing implementation gaps, and China's development highlighting the importance of transboundary data sharing, coordinated operation, and downstream risk evaluation. Our findings underscore the need for integrated adaptation through four pillars: climate-adaptive infrastructure, ecosystem-based measures, diversified renewable portfolios, and enhanced transboundary coordination, with the next decade representing a critical decision window requiring coordinated infrastructure development focused on system-wide resilience.
Climate change is expected to reduce water availability, thereby increasing the complexity of water allocation and reallocation in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) of Australia. Key challenges include balancing water use between sustaining irrigated agriculture and maintaining environmental outcomes while managing the associated trade-offs optimally. Hydro-economic models provide a structured framework to examine these trade-offs, but their application in the MDB varies widely in how climate inputs, adaptation options, and outcome domains are represented in the modelling framework. This review synthesises MDB hydro-economic (HEM) studies with explicit focus on climate change and explores how climate risks, adaptation responses and water allocation trade-offs are represented within MDB HEM studies. Of 152 shortlisted MDB focused HEM studies, 57 are identified as climate focused HEM studies, which include 28 direct climate focused and 29 indirect focused studies. Direct climate focused studies indicate that drying reduces water availability and allocation reliability, with uneven effects across regions, sectors, and entitlement types. Horticulture and downstream ecosystems, including wetlands, are particularly sensitive to water reductions, while annual crops can adapt in the short-run. Adaptation options such as targeted water recovery, water trading, and efficiency or infrastructure upgrades can reduce losses under moderate climate change scenarios. The review suggests that future MDB hydro-economic modelling will require greater use of ensemble climate scenarios, explicit treatment of uncertainty, more realistic representation of ecological outcomes, institutional rules, market behaviour, and adaptive decision-making.
The privatisation of water and sanitation services has accelerated significantly in Brazil, driven by a shift towards financialisation, since the regulatory change enforced by the 2020 reform. While the impacts of financialised management are widely debated, a critical gap remains in empirical research that connects the mechanisms of financial engineering with non-compliance with the Human Rights to Water and Sanitation. Through the lens of financialised privatisation, this study investigates how this financial logic exacerbates the dissociation between the global capital extraction and the social objectives of service provision, focusing on the concession of the Metropolitan Region of Maceio. Through an analysis of BRK Ambiental, a subsidiary of the private equity firm Brookfield, the research demonstrates the social-spatial inequities within a framework of profit maximisation, natural monopoly, and power asymmetry. The findings reveal that the operator is highly leveraged, prioritising the payment of debt interest over staff wages and essential infrastructure investments, despite the persistence of critical gaps in access. This has resulted in actual tariff increases and a continued reliance on public funds, despite the presence of private management. This dynamic is particularly damaging in areas with impoverished populations, resulting in an increase in complaints and protests from users regarding water shortages and excessive charges. The article concludes that financialised privatisation reconfigures the sector to extract value for global capital, tending to decouple the means from the social ends of service provision.
Hydrometeorological hazards pose heightened risks to society, whether as standalone events or as multiple hazards that intersect across space and time. A key component of managing these risks is assessing hazard recovery to guide response and mitigate future impacts. Satellite-based Earth Observation (EO) is a valuable data source for mapping physical changes in hazard impacts and recovery, and, in combination with non-EO data, for contextualizing qualitative, functional, resilience, and risk-based components of recovery. We summarize the physical features mapped by EO to monitor recovery from hydrometeorological hazards, and the uses and challenges of integrating non-EO data to achieve contextual measures of recovery. Large-scale measures of land cover and land use classes, and vegetation features, integrate with aggregated non-EO datasets but have limited utility for interrogating fine-scale and temporal changes. Nighttime lights provide high-frequency monitoring of electricity outages and restorations as a proxy for recovery, with a robust empirical linkage to non-EO data, but remain subject to variability in the validity of this relationship across locations. Despite advances in modeling and image resolution for assessing building damage, little attention has been paid to mapping building reconstruction. Inconsistent use of non-EO data to contextualize EO-derived physical changes neglects evaluations of recovery reflecting changes in functional intent, resilience, and risk. We discuss opportunities for achieving more robust assessments while accounting for challenges in monitoring and non-EO integration. Future work is needed to expand integration for monitoring multi-hazard recovery and capture overlapping impacts and asynchronous recovery trajectories in support of reduced disaster risk.
This article examines how the Baaka-Darling River and Menindee Lakes have been politically, materially and discursively constructed as a 'sacrifice zone' within the modern governance of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis of more than three decades of local media, the paper traces how state actors normalise ecological degradation, frame ecological losses as ‘natural’, and advance technocratic infrastructure solutions that obscure systemic over-extraction and governance failures. Using Hajer’s concept of argumentative discourse, the study compares official narratives of efficiency, progress and sustainability with counter narratives articulated by Baaka-Darling River residents, water-justice advocates and Barkindji community leaders. These community-produced narratives contest the river’s expendability, foregrounding ecocultural connections to the Baaka-Darling, and expose how Basin reforms have sustained racialised and geographic hierarchies while diminishing Indigenous water rights. By situating water conflict in the Baaka-Darling within broader theories of sacrifice, extractivism and settler-colonial governance, the article shows how sacrificial logics have shaped the region’s environmental trajectory and how grassroots mobilisation works to unsettle these hierarchies. The findings highlight that sacrifice zones are not static or resigned spaces, but dynamic arenas of political negotiation in which local knowledge, Indigenous authority and social movement action reimagine more just and ecologically grounded water futures.
This synthesis paper examines how the ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ water infrastructure shape water governance in the Eastern Himalayan springscape. State-led initiatives in India, such as the Jal Jeevan Mission (JJM) and Dhara Vikas, are emblematic of the formal, seen infrastructure focused on expanding the physical infrastructure and springshed development activities. In contrast, community-led practices such as water user groups, biocultural conservation of springs, and informal water arrangements constitute the ‘unseen’ infrastructure rooted in a unique ensemble of traditional ecological knowledges and practices (TEKP) that are often an unseen layer of water governance. Drawing on fieldwork from the rural landscape of Sikkim, the study reveals the fractured governance process and inequitable benefits arising from government programs, such as JJM and Dhara Vikas. However, the community-led practices reflect the continual adaptation of the local communities, bridging the management and realities of water use. The material infrastructure connects aquifers to piped systems, but its effectiveness depends on the biocultural and institutional systems that sustain access to water. This paper argues for a flexible, adaptive governance that hybridizes TEKP with government initiatives, emphasising the need for a mountain-specific policy lens responsive to the complex hydrogeology and the intersectionality of the social realities in the Eastern Himalayan region.
Water security is emerging as a defining systemic challenge of the 21st century, with far-reaching implications for human well-being, economic stability, ecosystem integrity, and geopolitical relations. Accelerating climate change, population growth, urbanization, and environmental degradation are reshaping the availability, quality, and reliability of freshwater resources worldwide. This review examines how water security is likely to evolve toward 2050, integrating national to global perspectives through a system-based and security-oriented framework. It synthesizes recent scientific evidence across hydrology, water quality, infrastructure, governance, technological innovation, and geopolitical risk. Water security is conceptualized as a dynamic, multidimensional condition, encompassing resource availability, water quality, resilience to hydroclimatic extremes, institutional capacity, and equity. The analysis demonstrates that future water insecurity will be driven less by absolute scarcity alone and more by increasing variability, compound and cascading extremes, declining water quality, groundwater depletion, governance fragmentation, and unequal access. Technological innovation, including desalination, water reuse, digital monitoring, and artificial intelligence, offers significant potential but cannot substitute for effective governance, transboundary cooperation, and social legitimacy. Scenario analysis indicates that business-as-usual trajectories are likely to exacerbate systemic risks, whereas integrated, anticipatory, and resilience-focused pathways can substantially enhance water security outcomes. By synthesizing evidence within a unified analytical framework, this review provides a forward-looking roadmap for policy, research, and strategic planning. It emphasizes the urgent need to transition from reactive water management toward integrated, risk-informed, and governance-centered water security strategies capable of sustaining societies and ecosystems beyond 2050.
Given the increasing interest in community driven solutions for natural resource management, and water management in particular — such as the kuhl irrigation canals of the Western Himalaya; the hiti water distribution systems of Nepal; Ice ‘Stupa’ reservoirs in the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh; to the pokhari man-made ponds in the north-eastern Himalaya — this article reviews the existing scholarship addressing community water infrastructure in the Himalaya. Specifically, this review documents the extant solutions along four dimensions of water use, namely: water harvesting, storage, and distribution for irrigation and domestic consumption as well as infrastructure for harnessing water for energy production and other alternative uses. The scholarship addressing these dimensions is summarised as an inventory to aid future research and further analysed with the aid of three case studies: the first on farmer managed irrigation systems, the second on the stone-spout (hiti) systems of Nepal, and the last on the incorporation of micro-hydro power in community water regimes across the Himalaya. The final analysis reflects on the following questions: what gaps exist in our current understanding of Himalayan community water infrastructure? What are the challenges and opportunities evident in the existing literature surrounding Himalayan community water infrastructure? And finally, what methodological interventions are needed to ensure a more nuanced understanding that can aid in the provision of resilient and just water infrastructure?
In Ghana, the Livelihood Empowerment against Poverty Program (LEAP) which was launched in 2008, is a national cash transfer social protection program that provides bi-monthly payments to extremely poor households as an investment in their human capital. Although the program has been shown to improve food, nutrition, and health outcomes, its impact on household water security remains unclear, particularly in Ghana's semi-arid Upper West Region, where climate variability and water scarcity are intensifying. Underpinned by Sen's Capability approach, we conducted in-depth interviews (n = 25) with women LEAP beneficiaries. Thematic analysis showed that while cash transfers helped pay for water, maintain infrastructure, and purchase storage containers, they were insufficient and inconsistent to ensure reliable, sustained access to water. Consequently, beneficiaries' resort to alternative coping strategies to remain water secure, including borrowing money to purchase water, borrowing water from family and friends, and obtaining water on credit at public sales points. These findings are paradoxical: although beneficiaries receive what is often perceived as "free money" from the state, many still struggle to afford a necessity such as water. The findings show that while cash transfers can enhance water-related capabilities, irregular and limited payments trap households in cycles of pre-committed debt, leaving little flexibility to address ongoing water insecurity. Beyond LEAP, these findings highlight a broader limitation of social programs that operates in contexts of infrastructural scarcity and environmental stress. Given that over 2.2 billion people lack safe drinking water, these findings underscore the need to integrate social protection with investments in water infrastructure and service delivery. Strengthening programs like LEAP to include water access as a complementary service could enhance their ability to address multidimensional poverty and improve water security.
Water insecurity is shaped not only by water availability but also by governance and service systems, an issue that is increasingly pressing in cities. In the African policy context, the Africa Water Vision 2063 and Policy, positions water security and safe sanitation as central to achieving Agenda 2063. Framing household water insecurity through reliability and spatial equity, speaks directly to these continental aspirations. This study examines household water insecurity in three Namibian towns, (Ongwediva, Rundu, and Windhoek), which differ in their hydroclimatic conditions and water supply systems. Drawing on the 12-item Household Water Insecurity Experiences (HWISE) scale and supplementary survey data, we examine how the severity of household water insecurity varies across towns and across socio-spatial groups within each town. The findings show significant between- and within-town differences. Windhoek, the capital city and economic hub of the country, faces severe physical water scarcity. Respondents in Windhoek report lower water insecurity scores, which could be explained by the city’s long-standing investment in augmenting the water supply and consistent promotion of water demand management strategies. Rundu, the second-largest town, is located in a water-rich basin (the Okavango Basin) and has the highest household water insecurity scores. These findings could result from inadequate and ageing water infrastructure and institutional constraints that affect the continuity of supply. In Ongwediva, relatively high levels of service coverage do not fully protect households from insecurity, as the system remains vulnerable due to its dependence on a long-distance transboundary transfer corridor that is affected by other factors, such as power cuts. In town comparisons reveal that informal and higher-density suburbs tend to have higher insecurity scores than other residential areas. These findings suggest that household water security is rarely the result of hydrology alone. Infrastructure constraints, institutional capacity, and climate variability often intersect in ways that shape the reliability of water services.
The Indus Water Treaty (IWT), a water sharing agreement to allocate the water of Indus River System (IRS) between India and Pakistan currently stands at a critical moment of suspension. Moreover, a convergence of diplomatic, hydrological, and climatic challenges raises questions over the future of transboundary water governance in this institutionally complex basin. This paper presents a comprehensive spatio-temporal assessment of contemporary challenges, and prospects for modernization across the treaty rivers using a novel geospatial approach that integrates multiple datasets, indicators, and a structured literature review. Results reveal pronounced spatial and temporal heterogeneity in water availability, shaped by climate change impacts, natural hazards, demographic expansion, and intensifying hydro-political tensions. Within IRS, Chenab and Ravi endure the highest water stress due to their position along the treaty’s physical boundary, Jhelum is heavily influenced by persistent geopolitical contention, and Sutlej is subjected to intense population growth and economic development. Initial disputes over infrastructure development have proliferated with climate change extremes and rising hydro-political tensions increasing turbulency in IRS. The number and frequency of disputes in IRS have also increased and diversified in recent decades, diminishing cooperation that preceded the treaty’s suspension. Although IWT has been used as a diplomatic instrument during periods of tensions, its water-sharing provisions have not been the casus belli of conflict. To sustain cooperation, especially at a point of institutional abeyance, IWT must be modernized with emphasis on joint commission process with an international guarantor, surface and groundwater quantity and quality, disaster prediction, and above all, strengthening co-benefits with shared projects to provide future decades of resilience.
Indigenous Peoples' conceptualisations of water justice challenge dominant paradigms in water governance by foregrounding relational, spiritual, and place-based understandings of water. Rather than framing water as a resource to be allocated or managed, many Indigenous communities view water as a living entity with inherent rights and a central role in sustaining interconnected life systems. This article examines how Indigenous Peoples' conceptualisations of water justice differ from Western approaches, which often prioritise individual rights and utility. Through case studies of First Nations and Alaska Tribes in the Yukon River, the Awaj & uacute;n in the Chiriaco River, and the Sami in the Deatnu River, the paper illustrates both the resilience of Indigenous Peoples' ontologies and the tensions that arise when colonial or state-led projects and policies override Indigenous Peoples' sovereignty and knowledge systems. Drawing on these cases, a framework for ethical co-visioning of water futures is presented, outlining principles, practices, and policy spaces that support sustainable water governance. Achieving water security requires not only recognition of Indigenous Peoples' governance systems, legal traditions, and cosmologies, but also their full inclusion in decision-making processes to collectively overcome the 'crisis of imagination' hindering innovative policy responses. This article contributes to the growing recognition that water security cannot be achieved through material provision alone but must also attend to ethical, cultural, and relational dimensions of water.
We provide a collective narrative that connects Indigenous and dominant knowledge around three Living Rivers in Australia: Baaka (New South Wales), Roper (Northern Territory), and Martuwarra (Western Australia) that are acknowledged by the Traditional Custodians as living ancestors. Drawing on interviews in 2024 with eight Indigenous Elders who belong to one of the three Living Rivers, and other knowledge holders, all of whom are co-authors, we provide a holistic understanding of the place, story, importance, and threats to these rivers. The narrative is developed from ‘In-place Dialogues’ as a form of cross-cultural ‘Yarning’ with local knowledge holders captured on film, transcribed and then contextualised by a collective voice. The collective narrative describes expropriation (e.g. dispossession of Country including of the Living Rivers), extraction (e.g. systematic water extractions from the Living Rivers unauthorized by Indigenous Traditional Custodians), exploitation (e.g. no or minimal water rights accorded to First Peoples of the Living Rivers) and exclusion (e.g. lack of legal recognition of ‘First Law’ and dominant legal decision-making authority for the Living Rivers) in relation to the three rivers. In response, we argue for Just Water Futures for Living Rivers centred on Indigenous knowledge and First Law that ‘Expands the Circle’ of knowledge and decision-making in relation to the who, what, how and when water gets allocated for the benefit of all (humans and non-humans) forever, what we call EveryOne, EveryWhere, EveryWhen.
Climate change and anthropogenic nutrient enrichment are driving the proliferation of algal blooms worldwide, posing a significant threat to aquatic ecosystems, including urban reservoirs. As water security in these systems is critical, inadequate monitoring continues to contribute to water quality deterioration and the loss of vital ecosystem services. This study aims to develop early detection tools for harmful algal blooms using Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery, the Random Forest algorithm, and in situ data. Model performance was evaluated for Trophic State Index (TSI), Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a), and surface water temperature in urban reservoirs, with initial calibration and validation on the A Baxe reservoir, followed by external validation in As Forcadas (northwest Spain). Spectral indices - such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Brightness Index (BI) - and specific bands were derived using Google Earth Engine (GEE). The developed models demonstrated high accuracy, with coefficients of determination (R-2) of 0.97 for Chl-a, > 0.80 for TSI, and > 0.70 for temperature. The TSI model's relevance is underscored by its integration of various physicochemical parameters (N-total, P-total, Secchi Disk, Chl-a), and the BI index showed strong performance in estimating temperature despite Sentinel-2 ' s lack of a thermal band. This study proposes transferable methodologies for any reservoir, delivering an effective tool for the early detection of harmful algal blooms in stagnant waters, and contributing significantly to improved water resource management and the protection of aquatic ecosystems.
