Quality of groundwater resources in Afghanistan

Abstract

Water is the main source of energy production and economy in Afghanistan where agriculture accounts for more than 50% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). Access to safe drinking water is still a problem in the country, which has caused different health issues and even child mortality especially in rural areas. Groundwater is the main source of drinking water in the country. However, little knowledge is available about the quality of groundwater throughout the entire country, and its quality has not been investigated extensively yet like in other countries in the world. While most people think that consuming groundwater is a reliable and safe source of drinking water for health, the United Nations (UN) agencies report various kinds of waterborne diseases and even child mortalities due to drinking water quality in the country. In this article, significant geogenic and anthropogenic factors that play a vital role in groundwater contamination of the country are identified and explained. Different geogenic contaminations such as arsenic, fluoride, sulfate, and boron occur in several areas of Afghanistan that have a direct effect on human health. The water quality mapping for Afghanistan is completed for half of the country, which shows that groundwater is plagued by high levels of fluoride and arsenic in some areas. The water quality mapping of the other half of the country cannot be completed due to security concerns currently. Also, there are different kinds of waterborne diseases such as diarrhea, cholera, and dysentery that can be seen in different parts of the country because of anthropogenic activities which continuously deteriorate groundwater.

Groundwater arsenic contamination in the Bengal Delta Plain is an important public health issue

“…It was only with the discovery of newer contaminated regions some years later that the extent of the problem could be comprehended. At present, the category of the most severely affected countries comprises Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Afghanistan (Chowdhury et al 2000;Khalequzzaman et al 2005;Mukherjee et al 2006;van Geen et al 2014;Hayat and Baba 2017). Several other affected Asian countries are China (Guo et al 2001;Zhang et al 2012;Xie et al 2013;Sanjrani et al 2019), Vietnam (Berg et al 2001;Buschmann et al 2008;Hanh et al 2011;Le Luu 2019), Nepal (Shrestha et al 2003;Yadav et al 2012;Mueller 2017), Cambodia (Gault et al 2008;Kim et al 2011;Murphy et al 2018), Indonesia (Winkel et al 2008;Bentley and Soebandrio 2017), Korea (Ahn 2012;Bae et al 2017) and Pakistan (Fatmi et al 2009;Brahman et al 2013;Shaikh et al 2018).…”

Ancient Karez System in Afghanistan: The Perspective of Construction and Maintenance

“…Afghanistan [22] Sufficient water resources are not available in most regions of the country. Inadequate water resources and unsustainable practices of irrigation have dramatically depleted the groundwater level and dried up Karez systems which resulted in loss of local community control over water resources [23].…”

Comparative study on synchronous adsorption of arsenate and fluoride in aqueous solution onto MgAlFe-LDHs with different intercalating anions

“…Arsenic and uoride are contaminants present in natural water environments, and oen coexist in groundwater. Especially in some countries, such as China, 1 Mexico, 2 Pakistan, 3,4 Afghanistan, 5 India, 6 Argentina, and Chile, 7 concentrations of arsenic and uoride in groundwater in some areas are much higher than WHO's and local drinking water standards. Arsenic and uoride have harmful effects on human health and there are many toxicological studies on arsenic and uoride coexisting systems.…”