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    Review of 'The Impacts of Covid-19 Pandemic and Weather Conditions on Water Environment, a Case Study in Istanbul and London/South-east England'

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    The Impacts of Covid-19 Pandemic and Weather Conditions on Water Environment, a Case Study in Istanbul and London/South-east EnglandCrossref
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    The Impacts of Covid-19 Pandemic and Weather Conditions on Water Environment, a Case Study in Istanbul and London/South-east England

    The Covid-19 Pandemic affects not only populations around the world but also the environment and natural resources. Lockdowns and restricted new lifestyles have had wide ranging impacts on the environment (e.g., on air quality in cities). Although hygiene and disinfection procedures and precautions are effective ways to protect people from Covid-19, they have important consequences for water usage and resources especially given the increasing impacts of climate change on rainfall patterns, water use and resources. Climate change and public health issues may compound one another and so we used a DPSIR Framework to scope the main factors that may interact to affect water use and resources (in the form of reservoirs) using evidence from Istanbul, Turkey with some discussion of the comparative situation in the UK and elsewhere. We modified initial views on the framework to account for the regional, city and community level experiences. We noted water consumption in Istanbul has been increasing over the last two decades (except, it appears, in times of very low rainfall/drought); that there were increases in water consumption in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic; and, despite some increase in rainfall, water levels in reservoirs appeared to decrease during lockdowns (for a range of reasons). We also noted, through a new simple way of visualising the data, that a low resource capacity might be recurring every 6 or 7 years in Istanbul. We made no attempt in this paper to quantify the relative contribution that climate change, population growth etc are making to water consumption and reservoir levels as we were focused here on scoping those social, environmental and economic factors that appear to play a role in potential water stress and on developing a DPSIR Framework that could aid both subsequent quantitative studies and the development of policy and adaptive management options for Istanbul and other large complex conurbations (such as London and south-east England). If there are periodic water resource issues and temperatures rise as expected in climate projections with an accompanying increase in the duration of hot spells the subsequent additional stress on water systems might make managing future public health emergencies, such as a pandemic, even more difficult.
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      Review information

      10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-EARTH.ATQJZI.v1.RQAWBT
      This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com.

      water,adaptive management,covid-19,Environmental science,Climate change,patterns of use,Water resources,water management,climate

      Review text


      Weather conditions and climate change are two different things. There is a big misconception in the article about these two subjects. Weather condition is the atmospheric conditions that comprise the state of the atmosphere in terms of temperature, wind, clouds, precipitation, which is very temporary and unstable. But climate is the average weather in a place over many years. Climate change is a shift in those average conditions, that is accelerated in recent years due to environmental problems.

      The introduction begins with the importance of water and water management, which is good. Climate change must be defined and explained along with its effect on the water circle. Pandemic and climate change have to be discussed more about their origins and related effects on settlements. Some research claims that pandemic is also a result of climate change. Make sense of the connection between. So, the title of the article should be "The Impacts of Covid-19 Pandemic & Climate Change on Water Environment: The Case of Istanbul and London."

      Towards the end of the introduction, some unclear sentences appear. In line 117, "... unexpected situations such as the Covid-19..." What else? Every situation that is examined must be written here. In the line 118-119, specify the dates that data compiled. "previous years" is not a certain phrase. In lines 121-122, is there an implication for Covid-19 lockdown? Which lockdown? When? These paragraphs should be rewritten clearly.

      DPSIR is abbreviated for what? Explain the methodology. 

      In the figures, there are some graphics shared with meaningful data compiled from related authorities (some of them are not cited). In order to make sense of the metadata, this information should be selected between the exact dates. Istanbul's water consumption is between 2000-2020, but population and water consumption are between 2000-2019. The water reservoir level is between 2000-2021, etc. (?)

      Since this is a comparison article, the same data should be shared and interpreted for London, too. And before this, it should be explained why these two cities were chosen as case studies. What are the common and comparable features?

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