Through the lens of the 12 OECD Principles on Water Governance, this article examines six water resources and water services frameworks in Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and South America to understand enhancing and constraining contextual factors. Qualitative and quantitative methods are used to analyze each framework against four criteria: alignment; implementation; on-ground results; and policy impact. Four main target areas are identified for improving water governance: policy coherence; financing; managing trade-offs; and ensuring integrity and transparency by all decision makers and stakeholders. Suggestions are presented to support practical implementation of the principles through better government action and stakeholder involvement.

To address water-related issues of river pollution, floods, droughts, and ecological water allocations, there is a need for an integrated river basin management (IRBM) plan for the successful management of all the river basins in the country. Stakeholder engagement is one of the important elements for the effective implementation of IRBM. In this study, a systematic bibliometric analysis has been successfully carried out to identify the trends, patterns, and research gaps in the establishment of stakeholder engagement frameworks in IRBM. Three renowned scientific databases were used to quantitatively assess the published literature on stakeholder engagement. The search contributed by providing a clear understanding and mechanisms for an effective stakeholder engagement, thus highlighting the research gap, whereby there is a lack of an effective stakeholder engagement framework for IRBM. Based on the analysis results, it was found that many pieces of literature have been written about the implementation of IRBM, including the importance of stakeholder engagement or participation. However, there is very limited study on how effective stakeholder engagement could be carried out to enhance water management at the river basin level. The findings also recorded that stakeholder engagement can serve as a form of social learning, and leadership plays a significant role in ensuring the effectiveness of stakeholder engagement in IRBM. From the review analysis, it was concluded that further research studies need to be carried out at the river basin level to formulate an effective stakeholder engagement framework for the sustainable management of water.

Knowing the fraction of methane (CH₄) oxidized in landfill cover soils is an important step in estimating the total CH₄ emissions from any landfill. Predicting CH₄ oxidation in landfill cover soils is a difficult task because it is controlled by a number of biological and environmental factors. This study proposes an artificial neural network (ANN) approach using feedforward backpropagation to predict CH₄ oxidation in landfill cover soil in relation to air temperature, soil moisture content, oxygen (O₂) concentration at a depth of 10 cm in cover soil, and CH₄ concentration at the bottom of cover soil. The optimum ANN model giving the lowest mean square error (MSE) was configured from three layers, with 12 and 9 neurons at the first and the second hidden layers, respectively, log-sigmoid (logsig) transfer function at the hidden and output layers, and the Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm. This study revealed that the ANN oxidation model can predict CH₄ oxidation with a MSE of 0.0082, a coefficient of determination (R ²) between the measured and predicted outputs of up to 0.937, and a model efficiency (E) of 0.8978. To conclude, further developments of the proposed ANN model are required to generalize and apply the model to other landfills with different cover soil properties.

The Potential Impacts of Anthropogenic and Climate Changes Factors on Surface Water Ecosystem Deterioration at Kenyir Lake, Malaysia