WATER DEMAND MANAGEMENT & WATER SECURITY
INCREASED NEED FOR GROUNDWATER According to the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), groundwater provides half of all drinking water, over 40% of irrigation water, and a third of the industrial sector’s global need for water. Worldwide, about 2.5 billion people depend solely on groundwater to satisfy their daily drinking and other domestic water needs. By Isak Malherbe & Jonathan Schroder, AECOM
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emand for groundwater is increasing due to population growth and changing global consumption patterns. In this regard, groundwater depletion is largely driven by irrigated agriculture to satisfy needs for basic global food security and luxury crop outputs. Ever-deeper boreholes and tube wells, as well as more powerful pumps, put a strain on groundwater reserves that are not rejuvenated in a lifetime. Shared groundwater resources are also threatened due to climate variability and change, as well as quality deterioration, reports the SIWI. There is a growing need for society to understand what role it plays in water solutions. Governments, while providing
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frameworks and legislation, essentially respond to the way society, as the end-users, behaves around water use and pollution. As the general public, we need to be more concerned with water, and how we impact and use it to be able to achieve true, longterm sustainability. Securing a safe water supply was once a primary focus of people. We need to, once again, become more conscious every time we open our taps and use this water.
Seeing a shift Traditionally, rural areas in Africa have used groundwater as their main resource, with surface water developed mainly for urban areas. As a result, there has been a stigma attached to groundwater over the
years as a potentially less-desirable source of water. However, the recent devastating droughts across the continent have proven the resilience of groundwater, with an attendant shift towards tapping into this resource. An important part of this shift has been the realisation that implementing and operating large-scale surface water schemes can be prohibitively expensive to diffuse communities in our beautiful but hilly terrain. This has resulted in a renewed appreciation of the sustainability of groundwater resources, as well as more local surface water resources. For example, we have a specialist team focusing on groundwater development planning and associated remedial work such as pollution monitoring and mitigation. In
