Groundwater News Roundup (Jan/Mar 2024)
/Here's a roundup of some of the main stories making news in the groundwater industry
Humans are depleting groundwater worldwide, but there are ways to replenish it
If you stand at practically any point on Earth, there is water moving through the ground beneath your feet. Groundwater provides about half of the world’s population with drinking water and nearly half of all water used to irrigate crops. It sustains rivers, lakes and wetlands during droughts.
Understanding the Value of Groundwater in a Changing Climate
Groundwater anchors water and food security in many regions, providing nearly half the volume of all water withdrawn for domestic use and about 43 percent of water use for irrigation. But as a common-pool resource with open access, groundwater has historically been undervalued, overexploited, and mismanaged.
THE HIDDEN WEALTH OF NATIONS : THE ECONOMICS OF GROUNDWATER IN TIMES OF CLIMATE CHANGE - EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (ENGLISH)
At the global level, groundwater can buffer a third of the losses in economic growth caused by droughts and can protect cities against day-zero-type events. It is especially important for agriculture, where groundwater can reduce up to half of the losses in agricultural productivity caused by rainfall variability. By insulating farms and incomes from climate shocks, the insurance of groundwater translates into protection against malnutrition.
Groundwater: How Scientists Study its Pollution and Sustainability
Groundwater accounts for around 30 per cent of the world’s freshwater, making it an important resource for addressing current global issues, such as world population growth, agricultural intensification and increased water use in different sectors like oil and gas extraction and mining, apparel and textile manufacturing and livestock farming. To protect groundwater from the threats of overextraction and pollution, and to manage it sustainably for the future, it is essential to understand where groundwater in specific locations is originating from, what its quality is and how quickly it replenishes. Scientists can perform this kind of research by analyzing the water ‘fingerprints’ called “isotopes”, which are variations of atoms in the water molecule.
