Warnings of a groundwater crisis (with falling groundwater tables and polluted aquifers) have led to calls for urgent management responses. However, much of the discussion has been on the basis of anecdotal evidence (Brown and Halweil, 1998; Postel, 1999; Sampal, 2000). There is a need to evaluate the hard evidence of there being such a crisis and to identify the types of management responses that actually work. Moreover, it is necessary to determine how the UN system should continue to respond. While not denying the severity and urgency of the problems facing groundwater management, there does arise the question as to how broad macro generalizations translate into specific management responses. Competent UN agencies maintain that these issues have to be addressed within the specific contexts of the hydrogeological settings (and particularly the hydrodynamics of the aquifer systems) and the patterns of human use to which they are subjected. Failure to recognize the variability and range of these physical limits (and the range of services that groundwater and aquifers provide), together with the breadth of social demands placed upon aquifer systems, will continue to result in ineffective management responses. In this sense, groundwater management is required to be highly localized, and to a far greater degree than that applied to surface water management (the effective management of perennial surface water flows usually occurs at greater spatial scales than the level of an individual borehole catchment).
Groundwater continues to serve as a reliable source of water for a variety of purposes, including industrial and domestic uses and irrigation. The use of generally high-quality groundwater for irrigation (which is largely indifferent to water quality) dwarfs all other uses (Burke, 2002). In many developing country settings, reliance has turned to dependency and the establishment of perceptions of access and use that are intensely 'private' irrespective of the legal status of the groundwater. However, groundwater and the aquifers that host it are inherently vulnerable to a wide range of human impacts. The development of mechanized pumping technologies in the mid-twentieth century has induced widespread drawdown externalities, including the depletion of the all-important shallow aquifers. The disposal of human and industrial waste and the percolation of pesticides and herbicides have degraded many aquifers beyond economic remediation. The largely unseen nature of groundwater has resulted in development initiatives that are unaware of the hydrodynamic limits of the resource and unable to regulate the resulting patterns of abstraction. The consequences range from the drawdown of water levels beyond the limits of dugwells and manual pumping technologies to more subtle and deferred environmental health impacts resulting from the migration of poor-quality water, e.g. the mobilization of naturally occurring arsenic by drilling deep tubewells in Bangladesh is well documented (http://www.bgs.ac.uk/arsenic/bangladesh/reports.htm).
FAO, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have identified groundwater management as a key theme in their programme of normative and operational activities. Over some 40 years of technical cooperation, FAO and the UNDESA have been involved intimately with groundwater development and management in developing countries. The IAEA is actively engaged in a programme of groundwater isotope analysis to determine the ages and provenance of groundwater in key aquifers throughout the world. Through its International Hydrological Programme (IHP), UNESCO has been the principal supporter of groundwater science and applied research, providing a bridge between advances in the developed world and demands from developing countries.
The purpose of this paper is to:
establish links between the social and technical aspects of groundwater management against a contemporary background of rapid groundwater depletion and aquifer degradation;
search for guiding principles and criteria for establishing more sustainable paths to groundwater management through practical actions;
indicate a response of the UN system.
The paper uses case studies to illustrate key issues where source material is presented. It also proposes a research agenda to plug gaps in groundwater management. Furthermore, it elaborates strategic themes, principles and criteria in promoting sustainable groundwater management.
A contemporary search for principles needs to be based on the past 70 years of experience in both small and large-scale groundwater development (since the advent and popular deployment of mechanized borehole pumps). It should specifically address the areas of stress where congruent socio-economic and environmental factors are threatening long-term economic development.
With these issues in mind, the then UN ACC Sub-Committee on Water Resources (now simply called UN-Water) requested FAO, IAEA, UNESCO and UNDESA to prepare a paper on groundwater management for presentation to the Committee. Rather than providing technical solutions, the aim was to determine principles for policy responses and institutional adaptation in order to enable individuals, communities and economic agents to engage with groundwater in a fashion that could begin to close the gaps.
One of the first attempts to outline such principles led to the report titled "Large Scale Groundwater Development" (United Nations, 1960). The report was a response to the rapidly growing importance and exploitation of groundwater in a period of post-war reconstruction and expansion of irrigated agriculture. However, the world has moved on since then with many of the social and imperatives outweighing a considered, balanced approach to groundwater development and management. More recent approaches (World Bank, 1998, 1999) have developed these principles. However, such technical approaches start from the assumption that it is the resource that is to be managed rather than the use. This paper argues that it is also necessary to understand the 'pull factors': the demand for groundwater and aquifer supplied services to agriculture, municipal water supply, waste disposal and geotechnical stability (the problems associated with subsidence and groundwater rise). Furthermore, the paper contends that it is not possible to resolve competing demands for groundwater and aquifer use by simply managing the water resource. It argues that it is necessary to engage a broader array of socio-economic levers and actors.
