Global change and the groundwater management challenge

Abstract

With rivers in critical regions already exploited to capacity throughout the world and groundwater overdraft as well as large-scale contamination occurring in many areas, we have entered an era in which multiple simultaneous stresses will drive water management. Increasingly, groundwater resources are taking a more prominent role in providing freshwater supplies. We discuss the competing fresh groundwater needs for human consumption, food production, energy, and the environment, as well as physical hazards, and conflicts due to transboundary overexploitation. During the past 50 years, groundwater management modeling has focused on combining simulation with optimization methods to inspect important problems ranging from contaminant remediation to agricultural irrigation management. The compound challenges now faced by water planners require a new generation of aquifer management models that address the broad impacts of global change on aquifer storage and depletion trajectory management, land subsidence, groundwater-dependent ecosystems, seawater intrusion, anthropogenic and geogenic contamination, supply vulnerability, and long-term sustainability. The scope of research efforts is only beginning to address complex interactions using multiagent system models that are not readily formulated as optimization problems and that consider a suite of human behavioral responses.

Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Meteorological Elements in the North China District of China during 1960–2015

“…While the solar radiation [16], precipitation [17,18], ET0 [19], and AI [20,21] were found to have increased or decreased in different regions of the world. Earlier regional studies that performed a trend analysis of the meteorological elements are more focused on one climate element in an annual timescale.…”

Challenges of Groundwater as Resources in the Near Future

“…It is fairly certain that there are some pressing groundwater issues that we have to pay attention to, including changing climate, groundwater depletion, and sea level rise (Gorelick and Zheng, 2015). Korea is also facing most of these problems such as changing precipitation (Jang et al, 2015), sea level rise (Kim et al, 2009), and seawater intrusion especially in western coastal areas Song et al, 2007).…”

Geophysical and Hydrogeological Groundwater Prospectivity Mapping in the Kraaipan Granite-Greenstone Terrain, Southeast Botswana

“…The primary objectives were to map the rocks at depth to understand the 3D geology while the secondary objective was to subsequently promote mineral and groundwater exploration in the area. Groundwater represents the largest stock of accessible freshwater and accounts for about one-third of freshwater withdrawals globally ( [2] and references therein). There are increased demands for groundwater resources in the southern Africa region due to population increases and socio-economic development, for drinking, mining activities and associated settlements, small-scale irrigation, rural agro-industries, and agricultural and livestock purposes [3].…”