GoKawiilGenerally, when you hear “water use” and “sustainability,” you expect those words to be followed by some bad news. Humanity’s enduring ability to ignore the math of declining water supplies is almost impressive. But there are cases where actions have successfully reversed our loss of water resources. A new paper in Science by Scott Jasechko of the University of California, Santa Barbara, examines documented cases of groundwater recovery around the world to identify which strategies have worked.
Groundwater is invaluable for many reasons. For one, it’s (usually) cleaner than surface water. It’s also right under your feet and often close enough to the surface that it doesn’t take much energy to pump it up. And there’s loads of it down there, no matter the season. Because of this, humans use a lot of it for drinking water, agriculture, and every other use you can think of.
Unfortunately, in many places, the rate of groundwater use has grown to exceed the rate at which precipitation soaks into the ground to replenish it.
In shallow aquifers, this causes the water table to fall over time. It falls the most near pumping wells—because groundwater moves slowly through rock and sediment, the water table isn’t flat the way the surface of a lake is. In addition to the obvious fact that your aquifer could eventually become empty, it can also come with knock-on effects like increased energy costs for pumping, wells that run dry, and even land subsidence as desaturated sediment compacts.
Many of these problems are reversible, but it would require the amount of water entering the aquifer to be greater than the amount leaving it.