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Water balance of global aquifers revealed by groundwater footprint.

Tom Gleeson, Yoshihide Wada, Marc F P Bierkens … (2012)

Groundwater is a life-sustaining resource that supplies water to billions of people, plays a central part in irrigated agriculture and influences the health of many ecosystems. Most assessments of global water resources have focused on surface water, but unsustainable depletion of groundwater has recently been documented on both regional and global scales. It remains unclear how the rate of global groundwater depletion compares to the rate of natural renewal and the supply needed to support ecosystems. Here we define the groundwater footprint (the area required to sustain groundwater use and groundwater-dependent ecosystem services) and show that humans are overexploiting groundwater in many large aquifers that are critical to agriculture, especially in Asia and North America. We estimate that the size of the global groundwater footprint is currently about 3.5 times the actual area of aquifers and that about 1.7 billion people live in areas where groundwater resources and/or groundwater-dependent ecosystems are under threat. That said, 80 per cent of aquifers have a groundwater footprint that is less than their area, meaning that the net global value is driven by a few heavily overexploited aquifers. The groundwater footprint is the first tool suitable for consistently evaluating the use, renewal and ecosystem requirements of groundwater at an aquifer scale. It can be combined with the water footprint and virtual water calculations, and be used to assess the potential for increasing agricultural yields with renewable groundwaterref. The method could be modified to evaluate other resources with renewal rates that are slow and spatially heterogeneous, such as fisheries, forestry or soil.

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DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-CHEM.AVBFJ8.v1.RLYSAJ

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This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com.

ScienceOpen disciplines:	Chemistry
Keywords:	Agriculture, statistics & numerical data, trends, Asia, Desert Climate, Drinking Water, Ecosystem, Food Supply, Groundwater, Monte Carlo Method, North America, Recycling, trends, Water Supply, statistics & numerical data

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Indonesia, my country, needs more model in modeling water balance. This is because our environment has been altered by uncontrolled man-made activities. Land use and land cover have been abusively changed without considering how such act will influence water potential and reducing water supply capacity, including aquifer supplu capacity. Therefore we need to observe how other region of country deal with the problem through water balance model. Therefore we think that this article is very important.

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Water balance of global aquifers revealed by groundwater footprint.

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