Preserving water quality, restoration of aquatic ecosystems, the consequences of climate change and more efficient in consideration of environmental issues in development projects. The protection and management of natural resources, the control of emissions, the development of new energy sources, the development of innovative and non-polluting materials.
One of the most future challenges is water scarcity , which could be linked with increased electricity generation, in the power plant. Generally power plants consume huge amount of water sources for cooling, condensing etc....
Optimizing and minimizing the water consumption in the power plants is an interesting topic.
As demands for freshwater resources is increasing, the need for proper management of groundwater resources is necessary. If you like to work on groundwater, I suggest you to study some papers about groundwater potential mapping.
Some researchers have applied different models to map groundwater potential. You can find some papers in my page or Haleh Nampak, Adnan Ozdemir, or some other researchers.
I got my PhD from Japan long time ago. They have the best sanitation and distribution system for water.
Try to do research on developing new compact sewage fast bio treatment unit. This is highly needed for countries like India and Egypt where it is not easy to collect all effluents from small villages into one single big treatment unit. they are working on that in Netherland