Resource information
People have clustered at the
water's edge throughout civilization for the most
fundamental of reasons: without water there is no life.
Every major city in the world has a body of water or aquifer
nearby, since rivers and lakes predetermined where people
would gather and dwell, groundwater constitutes about 98
percent of the fresh water on our planet (excepting that
captured in the polar ice caps). This makes it fundamentally
important to human life and to all economic activity.
Groundwater resources in and around the urban centers of the
developing world are exceptionally important as a source of
relatively low-cost and generally high-quality municipal and
domestic water supply. At the same time, the subsurface has
come to serve as the receptor for much urban and industrial
wastewater and for solid waste disposal. There are
increasingly widespread indications of degradation in the
quality and quantity of groundwater, serious or incipient,
caused by excessive exploitation and/or inadequate pollution
control. The scale and degree of degradation varies
significantly with the susceptibility of local aquifers to
exploitation-related deterioration and their vulnerability
to pollution. Management strategies need to recognize and to
address the complex linkages that exist between groundwater
supplies, urban land use, and effluent disposal. Groundwater
tables have become the focus of keen interest in recent
years, as the supplies of water underlying urban areas have
dwindled and deteriorated, threatening the millions of
people who live above. When conditions are right, aquifers
refill regularly from infiltrating rainfall and runoff,
although sometimes with a substantial time lag. But those
favorable conditions are severely altered when the ground
above is overbuilt.
