The interdependence between water and energy (water-energy nexus) has been identified as one of the major challenges at European level, with roadmaps calling for the development of integrated approaches in this sector. The increase in river temperature is at the heart of this nexus, with anthropogenic thermal pollution adding to the effect of global warming. River Water Heat Pumps can play a major role by decarbonising district heating network (DHN) while actively cooling the aquatic resource. Hence, the objective of this short communication is to identify the scientific challenges to be met and the progress to be achieved considering the current state of the art. To illustrate the point, a rapid evaluation of the potential is performed for the city of Lyon in France resulting in an achievable cooling of ~1.5 K which is above the minimum threshold to see an effect on aquatic ecosystem while the CO 2 savings are significant for the DHN (~divided by a factor of 10). Because of its holistic nature, the impact assessment of such a system implies considering a wide diversity of indicators: energy, environmental, economics and sociological that need to be appropriately defined and quantified. In each field, progress beyond the state of the art to be performed has been identified, e.g. 4E analysis, cold water plume dispersion, integration of biodiversity in LCA.