“The world needs to get water-smart. Everyone has a role to play, and we cannot afford to wait.” – UNICEF.
World Water Day raises awareness about the 2.2 billion people who are living without access to safe water. It is about taking action to tackle the global water crisis. The focus of World Water Day 2022 is groundwater, an invisible resource with an impact visible everywhere.
The idea for this international day goes back to 1992 when a United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro took place and the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution by which 22 March of each year was declared World Day for Water.
First World Water Day was observed in 1993. The core focus of World Water Day is to support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 6: water and sanitation for all, by 2030.
The Significance Of Groundwater
Groundwater is water found underground in aquifers which are geological formations of rocks, sands and gravels that hold substantial quantities of water. It feeds springs, rivers, lakes and wetlands and seeps into oceans.
Life would not be possible without groundwater. Most arid areas of the world depend entirely on groundwater. Groundwater accounts for 99% of all liquid fresh water on Earth. Covered by active soil and sediment layers, groundwater is better protected than surface water from the negative impacts of human activities.
It is recharged mainly from rain and snowfall infiltrating the ground. It supplies a large proportion of the water we use for drinking, sanitation, agriculture, food production and industrial processes. It is critically important to the healthy functioning of ecosystems, such as wetlands and rivers.
In many places, groundwater feeds springs that are of high spiritual importance, such as the sacred spring in the Grotto of Massabielle in Lourdes, France; the Chalice Well at Glastonbury, UK; sacred hot springs in Hierapolis, Turkey; the Ban Ban Springs, an Aboriginal Cultural Heritage site in Queensland; and similar sites in Australia.
Moreover, groundwater resources are facing quantitative problems. Abstraction of groundwater from many large aquifers worldwide significantly exceeds the natural renewal rate, as recently estimated by the groundwater footprint approach. This deficit poses a threat to the health of aquifers and groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs), such as rivers and wetlands.
The largest-ever assessment of global groundwater wells by the University of California found that up to one in five wells were at the risk of running dry. Millions of wells around the world could run dry due to declines in groundwater levels; it will have cascading implications for livelihoods and access to reliable and convenient water for individuals and ecosystems.
Asia and the Pacific region has the lowest per capita water availability in the world, with groundwater use in the region predicted to increase 30% by 2050.
Growing industrialisation, waste deposition, use of pesticides and weedicides in agriculture, use of synthetic chemicals and pollutants released via sewage contaminate groundwater resources. Around 74% of natural disasters between 2001 and 2018 were water-related, including droughts and floods, and climate change-related.
In North America and Europe, nitrates and pesticides represent a big threat to groundwater quality: 20% of European Union (EU) groundwater bodies exceeds EU standards on good water quality due to agricultural pollution.
According to the latest edition of the United Nations World Water Development Report, when disasters hit, they destroy or contaminate entire water supplies and increase the risk of diseases like cholera and typhoid, to which children are particularly vulnerable.
Every day, over 700 children under 5 die from diarrhoea linked to inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene. By 2040, almost 1 in 4 children will live in areas of extremely high water stress.
The frequency and intensity of such events are only expected to increase with climate change. Climate change is disrupting weather patterns, leading to extreme weather events, unpredictable water availability, exacerbating water scarcity and contaminating water supplies.
Globally, water use is projected to grow by roughly 1% per year over the next 30 years. Our overall dependence on groundwater is expected to rise as surface water availability becomes increasingly limited due to climate change.
Groundwater — which exists almost everywhere underground, in gaps within soil, sand and rock — has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives and be the world’s insurance policy against climate change. But groundwater will only be able to lessen the impacts of climate change if it is carefully managed and if we invest in mechanisms to ensure that it gets to the people who need it most.