Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This chapter provides an overview of the issues and challenges facing policy makers intending to establish groundwater markets. It studies in detail two developed countries that have introduced groundwater trading and have some experience in its implementation—Australia and the United States of America—and draws out lessons from these countries that need to be considered for the development of groundwater markets around the world. The key lessons that this chapter stresses are: the importance of establishing institutions and regulations; investing in high quality economic and scientific research; that opportunities arise from crises; and that social concerns are not always the most important considerations to be aware of for efficient and effective groundwater markets.

This chapter investigates the potential and limits of the contingent valuation method for assessing the benefits of groundwater remediation or protection programs. The discussion is based on a review of the literature and on two original contingent valuation surveys conducted in France and in Belgium, in contexts where groundwater was expected to be particularly unfamiliar to respondents. Particular attention was paid to (i) people’s perception and understanding of the resource under study, and (ii) type and quantity of information provided by the questionnaire. In both cases, we show that the population is concerned about groundwater remediation or protection, especially to guarantee the wellbeing of future generations. Overall, we highlight that assessing willingness to pay through contingent valuation surveys is helpful for conducting an integrated valuation of groundwater protection benefits. However, we also point out two main limits which might restrict the relevance of the results obtained: (1) the respondents’ limited prior knowledge of groundwater and the risk that information provided by the questionnaire biases the elicitation process; and (2) two types of embedding effect, with the difficulty for respondents in considering the geographic extension of an aquifer and disentangling benefits derived from groundwater quality improvement from other environmental benefits.

Groundwater can be considered as a common-pool resource, is often overexploited and, as a result, there are growing management pressures. This chapter starts with a broad presentation of the range of economic instruments that can be used for groundwater management, considering current practices and innovative approaches inspired from the literature on Common Pool Resources management. It then goes on with a detailed presentation of groundwater allocation policies implemented in France, the High Plains aquifer in the USA, and Chile. The chapter concludes with a discussion of social and political difficulties associated with implementing economic instruments for groundwater management.

Two contrasting views prevail on groundwater use in situations of predominantly state-led irrigation development. The first considers ‘groundwater as liberation’, i.e., how, by capturing the irrigation initiative, farmers liberated themselves from ‘state’ water, enabling more intensive and productive agriculture. The second view – ‘groundwater as anarchy’ – considers groundwater as a declining resource, overexploited by millions of individualistic farmers in the absence of effective groundwater governance with mounting inequalities in groundwater use. We analyse the Janus nature of groundwater in the expanding groundwater economy in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Groundwater has redesigned irrigation frontiers, and caters to over 60 % of the total irrigated area, supplying more than 500,000 farms with irrigation water. However, more than half of the aquifers are overexploited, and typically only 40–50 % of farmers in a given area access groundwater. We conclude that groundwater use in North Africa cannot be qualified as anarchy, but rather as a negotiated disorder where the interests of farmers, the private sector, and the state, are continuously realigned. Groundwater ‘liberated’ farmers only partially from ‘state’ water, as the state has remained present in groundwater economies. Moreover, groundwater concerned a minority of farmers, who are often keen to get state support when facing resource depletion or harsh agricultural markets. Breaking the current conundrum will require creating space for change, by making visible the current and future effects of groundwater dynamics to local actors, and supporting the building of coalitions of actors towards a sustainable agricultural use of groundwater.

Groundwater management issues present a serious challenge partly because of the complexity and uncertainty that human elements (i.e. cognitive, social, cultural and political) bring into the problem, as well as our limited capacity to fully comprehend and deal with such elements and their interactions with the biophysical systems. Whereas there is a wide recognition of the importance of stakeholder participation for the design and implementation of effective policies, the ongoing depletion of groundwater and disputes surrounding management policies suggest the need for better participatory mechanisms. This raises the question of how human elements can be incorporated into groundwater policies. Whereas there is no single discipline that can provide answers for such crucial research and policy questions, this chapter argues that systems thinking (especially soft and critical approaches) has the potential to provide a framework of theories, methods and example applications to help incorporate human elements into groundwater management and research. This chapter aims to give an overview of systems thinking by firstly describing the theory, distinguishing between hard, soft and critical systems thinking approaches. Secondly, we discuss the importance of mixing methods from these approaches and evaluating ‘process’ and ‘outcomes’ when applying them. Thirdly, we review four example applications, and highlight their relevance to groundwater management systems.

Information and knowledge management challenges abound in groundwater sciences. Groundwater problems of interest to society are characteristically complex and exceed our ability to solve them without the aid of computational analysis. Yet discipline specific problems that are of interest to hydrogeologists frequently do not directly address the immediate decision making needs of policy makers, groundwater managers, and stakeholders. It is the immediate societal needs that drive the demand for science-based information for common problems in which groundwater figures as a prominent element. Integrated Assessment and Modeling (IAM) presents an approach for merging discipline and case-specific knowledge, such as those in hydrogeological sciences, with social drivers for use in decision support applications. Moreover, decision support systems (DSS) that are constructed and applied using integration as a guiding principle and design ethic can advance groundwater DSS beyond passive support toward active and, eventually, proactive support for implementations to achieve real world integrated groundwater management.

The goal of a data manager is to ensure that data is safely stored, adequately described, discoverable and easily accessible. However, to keep pace with the evolution of groundwater studies in the last decade, the associated data and data management requirements have changed significantly. In particular, there is a growing recognition that management questions cannot be adequately answered by single discipline studies. This has led a push towards the paradigm of integrated modeling, where diverse parts of the hydrological cycle and its human connections are included. This chapter describes groundwater data management practices, and reviews the current state of the art with enterprise groundwater database management systems. It also includes discussion on commonly used data management models, detailing typical data management lifecycles. We discuss the growing use of web services and open standards such as GWML and WaterML2.0 to exchange groundwater information and knowledge, and the need for national data networks. We also discuss cross-jurisdictional interoperability issues, based on our experience sharing groundwater data across the US/Canadian border. Lastly, we present some future trends relating to groundwater data management.

Conjunctive use (CU) of surface and groundwater storage and supplies is essential for integrated water management. It is also a key strategy for supporting groundwater-dependent ecosystems, and for adapting water systems to future climate and land use changes. CU has become increasingly sophisticated and integrated with other innovative and traditional water management techniques, such as water transfers, water reuse, demand management, and aquifer remediation. CU adds value for society (increasing average yield and reliability) but can also induce costs to some parties, such as damaging senior water rights of surface water users when pumping from the aquifer reduces streamflow. Groundwater overexploitation also can produce a host of undesirable economic and environmental impacts. Successful CU implementation typically requires changes in infrastructure and operations, but also changes in institutions and institutional arrangements to offset potential third party costs and protect ecosystems. This chapter analyses first the management and economic implications of CU, addressing advantages, costs and limitations, as well as the potential contribution of economic instruments to the conjunctive operation of groundwater and surface storage and resources. CU management models are then classified according to the CU problem, their formulation and solution techniques. Different applications of hydroeconomic models are reviewed in a wide range of CU problems. A few applications are discussed more in-depth, using cases from California and Spain. Then, we discuss the relevance of these models in decision-making, and the policy and institutional implications. Finally, we address limitations and challenges, and suggest future directions.

Models of groundwater systems help to integrate knowledge about the natural and human system covering different spatial and temporal scales, often from multiple disciplines, in order to address a range of issues of concern to various stakeholders. A model is simply a tool to express what we think we know. Uncertainty, due to lack of knowledge or natural variability, means that there are always alternative models that may need to be considered. This chapter provides an overview of uncertainty in models and in the definition of a problem to model, highlights approaches to communicating and using predictions of uncertain outcomes and summarises commonly used methods to explore uncertainty in groundwater management predictions. It is intended to raise awareness of how alternative models and hence uncertainty can be explored in order to facilitate the integration of these techniques with groundwater management.