Groundwater

• 19.11.2022
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Groundwater

Groundwater has been out of sight and out of mind for too long. It is the world’s most abundant freshwater resource and a crucial regulator of water extremes such as floods and drought. When we protect groundwater we save lives and ecosystems, improve health, reduce hunger and tackle climate change all at once. We must therefore increase understanding of groundwater so we can improve its governance and protect this vital resource.

Groundwater makes up 99 percent of all freshwater that is not frozen. It provides nearly half of the world’s population with drinking water and contributes to about half of the global food production. For some 2.5 billion people in the world, groundwater is their one and only source of freshwater.

But the importance of groundwater is not only a question of drinking water and irrigation of crops. Groundwater is, in the words of the 2020 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate, groundwater expert John Cherry, “the Earth’s life support system.”

In 2015, research based on satellite images from the American space agency NASA showed that many of the world’s biggest groundwater aquifers are being depleted at a much faster rate than they can be replenished. The situation may be most critical in India, which relies on groundwater for much of its food production but where the capacity of 54 per cent of groundwater wells are decreasing.

Groundwater is also threatened by pollution from agriculture, manufacturing and fracking. Chemicals such as PFAS are increasingly found in the drinking water in many countries. But the full extent of this problem is not known, since most countries do not monitor their groundwater. This means that the world’s freshwater may be even more limited than we think.

Source :https://siwi.org/why-water/groundwater/