The global groundwater crisis

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.

In this study, we use observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission to evaluate freshwater storage trends in the north-central Middle East, including portions of the Tigris and Euphrates River Basins and western Iran, from January 2003 to December 2009. GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage of approximately −27.2±0.6 mm yr−1 equivalent water height, equal to a volume of 143.6 km3 during the course of the study period. Additional remote-sensing information and output from land surface models were used to identify that groundwater losses are the major source of this trend. The approach used in this study provides an example of “best current capabilities” in regions like the Middle East, where data access can be severely limited. Results indicate that the region lost 17.3±2.1 mm yr−1 equivalent water height of groundwater during the study period, or 91.3±10.9 km3 in volume. Furthermore, results raise important issues regarding water use in transboundary river basins and aquifers, including the necessity of international water use treaties and resolving discrepancies in international water law, while amplifying the need for increased monitoring for core components of the water budget.