(The full document is available through an ftp link by clicking on the title above)
This book concerns itself with the specific management of groundwater as a component of integrated water management. It is predicated on the observation that groundwater is an often unnoticed and unacknowledged cornerstone in the foundation of many economic and environmental systems. Even in the contemporary accounts of ‘integrated’ water management, the special character of the aquifer systems that underpin the resource base is rarely discussed. It comes as no surprise that in many regions of the world, the groundwater resource base and the social, economic and environmental systems dependent on it are under threat from over-abstraction and pollution. It is important to recognize that this has been a recent phenomenon. The scale and intensity of the abstraction and pollution have only been apparent in the past twenty years. Prior to this groundwater was seen as a ubiquitous and reliable source of high quality water. What is equally apparent is that the evolution of effective management systems to address these threats will be a long-term process requiring both sustained political commitment and improvements in basic data and scientific understanding. These are essential for interpreting not only complex groundwater resource dynamics but also the patterns of socio-economic demands that are placed upon these resources. Waiting for data should not, however, become an excuse to delay action. Simple indicators such as major land-use changes, long-term water level declines and increases in salinity, pathogens or key pollutants represent important signals regarding the need for management. Immediate action to reduce pumping, control pollution sources and collect more detailed data on aquifer dynamics is essential to avoid irreversible economic, social and environmental damage. Management initiatives of this type -- even if only partially successful -- can provide a critical breathing space while more comprehensive and integrated management systems based on better understanding of groundwater dynamics and the socio-economic systems that exploit them are developed.
The social, economic and environmental values associated with groundwater are often unrecognized and undervalued. Groundwater is the most reliable source of supply for potable water and supports a wide array of economic and environmental services. Of these, agriculture, the largest abstractor of groundwater, is less sensitive to water quality but is generally the highest volume user. The role of groundwater in agriculture is important to recognize. Groundwater is the primary buffer against drought, and areas with access to groundwater irrigation are generally able to achieve higher agricultural yields. If climatic variability increases, as many analysts predict will be the case with global climatic change, the buffering value of groundwater will be a particularly important factor determining society’s ability to meet basic food security, drinking water supply and environmental needs that depend on reliable water sources. Even without climatic change, supporting global populations will require reliable water supplies. At the start of the 21st century, over 50% of the world’s population will reside in urban areas -- a dramatic increase from the 30% in urban population in 1950. Most of this urban population growth will occur in developing countries. Of the 23 mega-cities estimated to have populations over 10 million by the year 2000, 12 are heavily dependent on groundwater and, with the exception of London, all are in the developing world. Furthermore other mega-cities, such as Los Angeles, see groundwater as a fundamental component of their water supply planning or, as in the case of New Delhi, have large populations that are not served by the municipal system and rely on groundwater (which is often polluted) as their primary source of supply. Groundwater is thus central to meeting the large-scale needs for food security and urban drinking water supply.
Equally important to its role as a critical source of water supply for agricultural and municipal uses, groundwater plays a more subtle role related to poverty alleviation, health and social vulnerability. Access to groundwater is, perhaps, the most critical factor enabling many rural populations to maintain sustainable livelihoods. Assured water supplies greatly reduce the risks poor farmers face when investing in agricultural inputs such as seed and fertiliser. This enables them to increase yields, income levels, savings and capital formation substantially. Similar effects occur where health is concerned. Groundwater is generally less vulnerable to pollution than surface water sources. It is also often available in close proximity to points of use. In combination, these factors reduce the risks from waterborne disease and reduce time spent in collecting water from distant locations. Fewer sick days and reductions in time “wasted” collecting water translate into more time available for more productive purposes. Overall, by enabling individuals to accumulate reserves, access to groundwater enables rural populations to reduce their vulnerability, not just to drought, but to the full range of natural, economic and social hazards that generate much rural poverty.
Finally, groundwater plays a crucial role in the environment and water-related ecosystems. It is the primary source of base-flow in streams and rivers and is a major water source for most surface vegetation communities and wetlands. But the aquifers that host the groundwater are also the ultimate terrestrial ‘sink’ for land-based sources of pollution and accumulate waste products over time. Man-induced changes in groundwater conditions (circulation and aquifer status/configuration) often result in complex environmental and socio-economic impacts that are difficult to predict or remedy.
As a consequence, the positive role of groundwater as a cornerstone in the foundation of regional socio-economic and environmental systems is severely compromised. In many cases, the productive status of large groundwater bodies has been lost due to over-abstraction and pollution, which, under current recharge regimes and pollution intensity, will not be regained. Recent decades have seen a global explosion in both installed pumping capacity and potential sources of pollution. In many regions these are having a dramatic effect on groundwater availability. Piezometric levels in some arid regions are declining at rates greater than 3 meters/year and groundwater is being extracted at unsustainable rates. Pollution and quality deterioration are also reducing the availability of usable groundwater supplies. Once polluted, aquifer remediation is often economically or technically impossible.
The absolute availability of groundwater resources is, however, far less important for the sustainability of economic and environmental uses than characteristics of hydrologic systems dependent on specific groundwater conditions. Pollution, declines in water level and water quality frequently affect the sustainability of groundwater dependent uses, whether or not the resource base itself is threatened with physical exhaustion or severe degradation. It matters little if a basin contains 6,000 meters of sediments saturated with high quality groundwater (as the Gangetic Basin does) if groundwater levels have declined to the point where extraction is uneconomic, the shallow wells of poor farmers run dry and dry-season base flows in rivers and lakes decline. Disruption of hydrogeologic systems can easily threaten food security, drinking water supplies and the environment or cause massive poverty even when the amount of water physically available remains comparatively large. This crucial point is often missed in debates over the importance of groundwater management.
Because the links between users and the resource are often not apparent, and because many benefits associated with groundwater are public goods, the overall economic value of groundwater goes unrecognized. As a consequence, groundwater resources tend to be used with little regard for economic and other externalities. The direct user may be forced to internalize some impacts (of water level decline, for example), but the common-pool nature of the resource and the fact that many of the services it provides serve a public interest (such as environmental maintenance, health and poverty alleviation) create many challenges for management. From an economic perspective, the total value of groundwater is the sum of extractive and in situ values. Extractive values tend to accrue to individual users while in situ, or existence, values are generally public goods. This structural dichotomy creates strong social incentives for over-extraction. It also leads to competition between individuals, sectors, regions and, in some cases, nations. There is often a “race to the pump house” as individuals and different user groups seek to capture for themselves as much as possible of the benefits associated with the extractive value of the resource.
Beyond valuation and competition issues, the distribution of groundwater resources and use creates major challenges for management. Extraction points are generally dispersed and groundwater conditions often depend on the decisions of numerous individual land and well owners. Continuous aquifer systems, however, can extend across multiple geographic, administrative and political regions. In this situation, individual users generally have little hope of influencing groundwater conditions through isolated actions under their direct control.
In this overall context, some form of regulatory management (whether imposed by the government, user based organizations or through informal social mechanisms) is essential to maintain the manifest public interest and existence values of the resource. The role regulation can play is, however, specifically conditioned by socio-economic circumstances and the configuration and status of the aquifers being used. In many developing country situations, individual users number in the hundreds of thousands (in the case of India, there are over 20 million private wells). Direct regulation of individual users by government is often politically and practically impossible. Furthermore, management will need to vary at local to regional scales in order to reflect both social and hydrogeological factors. This can make centralized regulation inefficient and ineffective. In many cases, much more adaptive approaches to local resource management involving a high level of stakeholder participation are essential. Wherever possible these should be effectively coordinated at the respective river basin and aquifer scales. It is important to recognize, however, that many types of management (such as the control of pollution from concentrated urban or industrial sources or management to address localized pumping depressions) can be effective even without co-ordination at a larger scales. The absence of an effective mechanism for co-ordination should not be an excuse for the lack of management at local levels.
In this respect, it is clear that no action would be implementable or enforceable without general legislation declaring a public interest in the resource and enabling the government or other public or private bodies to undertake and enforce appropriate regulation.
Effective approaches to groundwater management cannot generally depend on single mechanisms. Political support for management rests on public and policy maker understanding of management needs. Education is essential. Economic incentives that reflect the full value of groundwater resources are also important. These need to work in concert with legal and regulatory frameworks that both enable local populations to develop management approaches suited to regional conditions and provide avenues for higher level interventions to address the actions of large individual consumers or polluters. Evolution of effective management approaches, thus, requires a delicate balancing act among individual, community and government roles and educational, economic, legal and regulatory mechanisms. Furthermore, because groundwater issues and the technical, social, economic, cultural and political factors influencing management options vary greatly between regions, no single template for management can be developed. As a result, the development of effective approaches will, in most cases, require a long-term process through which viable national, regional and local systems can evolve.
Although the evolution of effective groundwater management systems is not an easy process, it should not be an excuse to delay action. Management restrictions, such as reductions in pumping or controls on waste disposal can be relaxed if, at a later stage, more detailed information and understanding of aquifer dynamics suggest they are unnecessary. In general, the risks inherent in delaying management outweigh the potential costs associated with initiating management on the basis of imperfect information. Management restrictions, if later proved unnecessary, may have resulted in a temporary loss of economic and social benefits. If, however, management action is needed but not initiated, irreversible damage to the groundwater resource base may occur and result in far greater losses.
In a larger sense, the complexity of management makes the collection of targeted high quality information on groundwater systems and their dependent communities essential. It requires both long-term efforts to collect basic data and research to constantly refine understanding of both groundwater and socio-economic processes. Groundwater and socio-economic research need to be coupled. Hydrogeological research on its own is of relatively little use for management purposes unless it is complemented by information that links groundwater problems with their social and economic context. Furthermore, unless information is used to inform and educate the general public and policy makers, it will be difficult to develop social consensus regarding problems and potential solutions. For this reason, information has also to be clearly presented to inform and educate the general public and policy makers. Without a high degree of social consensus, management systems will often be politically impossible to implement.
Developing the social consensus necessary for effective groundwater management is further complicated by the deeply entrenched nature of existing organizations and by culturally defined ethical positions. In many countries, governmental water resource agencies have been designed according to centralized managerial principles and emphasize surface water resources. As a result they tend to rely on technocratic options to address the problems they perceive as most important. This can bring them into direct conflict with established users and local communities who often have different perceptions regarding the nature of problems. Management debates, as a result, often become polarized and deadlocked over differing perceptions and locus of control issues. Therefore, the process of policy making and implementation require that governments, and their technicians, conduct extensive awareness building campaigns to educate stakeholders, to elicit the losses associated to inaction, and to interest and involve users and local communities in management efforts. Ethical issues also complicate management. In some societies, groundwater is or has been linked to land ownership while in others it is viewed as a ‘common heritage’ (not to be confused with the British ‘common law’ system) to which all should have equal access, at least for basic needs. These conflicting positions are enshrined in religious doctrines such as the Shari’a (where the ‘right to thirst’ is a basic principle) and in western legal concepts rooted as early as Roman times (in which groundwater ownership follows land ownership). At the same time, rights of access to groundwater have generally been linked to land ownership. There is, thus, often an unclear distinction between the ’private‘ nature of groundwater rights and ’public‘ ownership of the resource itself. This contradiction is brought to the fore by increased recognition of the need for water to be used more efficiently. Market mechanisms can play a major role in achieving efficiency objectives, and more emphasis is now being given to the nature of water as an economic resource in global debates. This emphasis translates into initiatives to clarify water rights, encourage water markets and issue ’concessions‘ in some countries. However, the process may be stillborn if there is no recognition that water resources, by their very ‘public’ nature, require regulation and are not amenable to absolute free market solutions. As these initiatives increase, tensions related to underlying ethical issues can also be expected to increase. If groundwater is viewed as a common heritage to which all have fundamental rights of access, the ethical basis of un-regulated concessions or markets that allocate water depending on ability to pay becomes controversial. No conflict exists between the basic goal of efficient and effective management and the common heritage or private nature of groundwater resources. How efficient management is to be achieved, the sets of social objectives against which efficiency is measured (including maintenance of supplies for the poor and the environment), what sections of society play a role in decision making and what management mechanisms are used all touch deep ethical roots and can become points of tension. This type of issue – as with many issues in society – may have no fundamentally correct answer. Such debates are, however, central to developing the social consensus on which political decisions regarding groundwater depend. This is why water law systems tend not to adhere to philosophical neatness but devise pragmatic balances between the investment needs related to the economic features of water and the need for public regulation associated to the social and environmental dimensions of the resource.
In conclusion, social, economic, cultural and ethical dimensions are likely to be as important as technical dimensions in the evolution of approaches to address existing and emerging groundwater problems and ensure the sustainability of key social, economic and environmental systems. Basic data and information on aquifer condition and the projected demands as well as effective user participation based on education and constructive dialogue are essential inputs for resolving such complex issues. Over the long-term, education of children is particularly important to shift society’s awareness and understanding of both groundwater problems and management opportunities. Groundwater problems are generally not amenable to rapid solutions. Rather they signal the need to develop management systems capable of flexibly addressing and predicting constraints as they arise. In many developing countries this process is in its infancy and it is crucial to initiate and encourage whatever management actions are currently feasible while starting the long-term process of developing flexible, integrated management systems.