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      Global change and the groundwater management challenge : Groundwater Management Challenge

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      Water Resources Research
      Wiley-Blackwell

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          General Theory of Three-Dimensional Consolidation

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            Theoretical Soil Mechanics

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              Water balance of global aquifers revealed by groundwater footprint.

              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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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Water Resources Research
                Water Resour. Res.
                Wiley-Blackwell
                00431397
                May 2015
                May 2015
                : 51
                : 5
                : 3031-3051
                Article
                10.1002/2014WR016825
                df34535d-39b6-428d-bb15-8b5592045557
                © 2015

                http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1.1

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