Resolving the Water Crisis: There's a Way, But Is There the Will?

Abstract

In this issue paper, the authors refine the definition of water sustainability to account for temporal dynamics and spatial variability, identify specific challenges that must be resolved in the very near future to avoid catastrophic outcomes on levels ranging from economic disruption to survival of mankind, discuss related policy changes and potential effectiveness, and describe several technologies available to achieve water security and sustainability. While water quality certainly poses formidable challenges, in this piece we emphasize and address challenges associated with dynamic water supply availability. Our future as a society will depend upon how well and how rapidly we navigate these challenges in the coming years. As such, the main objective is to encourage private and public sector practitioners to consider revising existing programs, and to update current industry business models in a manner that promotes expedited solutions, alignment of beneficial goals, and motivates the biggest consumers of water to adopt modern data collection and decision support technologies.

Groundwater for People and the Environment: A Globally Threatened Resource

“…The threat to groundwater resources materializes at the aquifer scale, primarily in semiarid and arid regions with naturally low recharge rates and high rates of groundwater withdrawal destined primarily to grow crops (Bierkens and Wada 2019;Masoudi et al 2019;Bozorg-Haddad et al 2020), although groundwater shortages may occur in humid areas, also (see, e.g., Hunt 2003). Examples of overdrafted regional aquifers can be found in Loaiciga et al (2000), Custodio (2002), Scanlon et al (2012), Margat and van der Gun (2013), Konikow (2013), Döll et al (2014), and Kram et al (2023), Bostic et al (2023), but many others exist (see below).…”

“…Sustainability is herein defined as the capacity of groundwater to provide beneficial services to humans while protecting the environment and groundwater-dependent ecosystems in perpetuity. See discussions of groundwater sustainability in Alley (1999), Loaiciga (2003b), Alley and Leake (2004), Wada and Bierkens (2014), Gleeson et al (2020), Konikow and Bredehoeft (2020), and Kram et al (2023), which are a few examples in a growing literature on groundwater sustainability.…”