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Groundwater is an important source of water for many human needs, including public supply, agriculture, and industry. With the development of any natural resource, however, adverse consequences may be associated with its use. One of the primary concerns related to the development of groundwater resources is the effect of groundwater pumping on streamflow. An new USGS report summarizes the scientific insights.
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In the Bangla language, ‘easy like water’ translates roughly to 'piece of cake.' The irony is that in Bangladesh, with 160 million people in a country the size of Wisconsin, water poses a relentless threat. With stronger cyclones and accelerating glacier melt upstream, flooding may create 20 million climate refugees by 2050. A documentary film.
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Based on a meeting at the Stimson Center, Washington, USA, May 2012, the Brookings report «Water Challenges and Cooperative Response in the Middle East and North Africa» first provides a brief overview of available water resources in the Middle East and Northern African region. It then discusses the salient socio-economic and environmental stresses and trends that will drive and condition water supply and demand over the coming decades. Next, the report sketches prevailing water management approaches that are being developed or might be brought to bear.
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A new UNESCO report covers ancient and modern climate change, impacts of climate change on water resources, ecosystems and socio-economy in the Yellow River Basin.
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Within the scope of IWMI’s «Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture» a comparative study of the historical development of nine selected river basins around the world is conducted, aimed at the improvement of rural development through agricultural water use strategies in developing countries. The report on «The Historical Evolution of the Water Resources Development in the Jordan River Basin in Jordan» is a contribution.
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A serious lack of reliable and consistent data severely hampers scientific knowledge about the state of Himalayan glaciers. As a result, the contribution of glacial melt to the Himalayan river basins remains uncertain. This is of grave importance because declining water availability could threaten the food security of more than 70 million people. There is thus an urgent need to improve cross-boundary scientific collaboration and monitoring of glaciers to bridge the knowledge gap and allow policy options to be based on appropriate scientific evidence.
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Ms Emma Lupton, working on her Msc in Environmental Technology and Water Management at Imperial College London, provided us with her perspective on this year’s World Water Week in Stockholm.
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Over the past decade geophysical methods have gained an increased popularity due to their ability to map hydrologic properties. Such data sets can provide valuable information to improve hydrologic models. Instead of using the measured geophysical and hydrologic data simultaneously in one inversion approach, many of the previous studies apply a Sequential Hydrogeophysical Inversion (SHI) in which inverted geophysical models provide information for hydrologic models. A PhD thesis (2012) by Daan Herckenrath.
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Groundwater is a life-sustaining resource that supplies water to billions of people, plays a central part in irrigated agriculture and influences the health of many ecosystems. Most assessments of global water resources have focused on surface water, but unsustainable depletion of groundwater has recently been documented on both regional and global scales. It remains unclear how the rate of global groundwater depletion compares to the rate of natural renewal and the supply needed to support ecosystems. The groundwater footprint is the first tool suitable for consistently evaluating the use, renewal and ecosystem requirements of groundwater at an aquifer scale.
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