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Understanding groundwater abstraction effects is vital for holistic impact assessments in areas depending on groundwater resources. The objective of our study was to modify the state-of-the-art AWaRe (available water remaining), freshwater impact assessment specifically for use in LCAs in areas dependent on groundwater resources. The new method, called "AGWaRe" (available groundwater remaining), reflects groundwater availability, based on a fraction of available groundwater remaining locally relative to a reference. Furthermore, our method increases spatial resolution beyond 1770 km grid cells and adjusts demarcations in order to improve the representation of the heterogeneity of groundwater catchments. The applicability of AGWaRe was demonstrated on three groundwater systems producing 5 million m water for the city of Copenhagen, namely Advanced Treatment of Groundwater, Simple Treatment of Groundwater and Infiltration of Reclaimed water. Results were normalised to compare with other effects of supplying water to an average Danish person. The normalised impacts for drinking water for one person ranged between 0.1 and 39 PE (person equivalent) for the three systems, which indicates that effects on groundwater resources differ substantially between systems. A comparative LCA of these groundwater systems shows that other impact categories range between 0 and 1 PE/person. Advanced Treatment of Groundwater generally has the lowest effect, for example <50% of the other groundwater systems in Global Warming Potential. The AGWaRe results indicate that freshwater impacts from Simple Treatment of Groundwater are up to 100 times greater than for Infiltration of Reclaimed water. Furthermore, AGWaRe exposes differences between the groundwater systems that AWaRe cannot evaluate, because one AWaRe cell covers two of the systems in question. These improvements are crucial for groundwater managers looking to include sustainability considerations in their analysis and decision-making.

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Groundwater stored in aquifers experiences a wide variety of natural, induced and/or anthropogenic disturbances. Among them, groundwater extraction is the main disturbance that affects most of the aquifers in the world. Aquifer’s resilience, understood as the potential of the aquifer to sustain disturbances on the long term and to guarantee essential qualities and functions, provides a key tool when assessing sustainable groundwater management alternatives. The aim of this work is to illustrate an aquifer resilience framework that can support groundwater sustainable management. A theoretical framework is based on the identification of the key variables that parameterize the quantitative and qualitative responses of the groundwater flow system to pumping. An example from the literature based in Denmark is provided as an illustration of the proposed framework. The results show that long-term high quality data are essential to make a step further in aquifers dynamic responses. The quantitative understanding of the aquifer’s behavior before, during and after groundwater extraction provides a valuable source of information in order to identify thresholds of change (tipping points, transitions or regime shifts) which could permit pro-active groundwater management decisions. Moreover, a deeper understanding on the aquifer’s dynamics provides useful information in order to avert threats that may put the sustainability of the system at risk.