Problems related to freshwater are clearly intensifying. They manifest in multiple forms and are often region-specific, shaped by local geochemistry, infrastructure histories, climatic regimes, and patterns of industrial and agricultural pressure. Nature seems to be improvising its own kind of jazz, producing novel responses to decades of anthropogenic pollution. In the United States, freshwater-related challenges take one form; in southern Africa, they may be entirely different. Yet even this comparison is incomplete: in many regions the same stressors generate divergent outcomes because freshwater systems are not merely conduits of water, but complex ecological media with their own internal dynamics, thresholds, and feedbacks. The full geographical diversity of emerging freshwater problems has yet to be comprehensively understood, and the scientific vocabulary for describing these emerging configurations remains, in many respects, underdeveloped.
Much remains to be discovered in the study of this topic. The issue is no longer limited to the stable provision of populations with high-quality drinking water—this stage has already been passed. Freshwater now appears as an arena in which multiple crises converge: chemical contamination, microbial transformations, sediment remobilization, infrastructure aging, climate-driven hydrological volatility, and governance failures that are often invisible until their biological consequences become irreversible. The situation with freshwater is far worse and far more complex. What has occurred is an intrusion into a natural system of extraordinary complexity—one that functions through multi-scale interactions among chemical signals, biological adaptation, and ecological regulation. In this sense, freshwater degradation should be understood not as a linear decline in “quality,” but as a restructuring of environments, where new and insufficiently studied states can arise, including states with unexpected infectious properties.