UNESCO Chair workshop on international strategy for sustainable groundwater management : transboundary aquifers and integrated watershed management

Groundwater is the most important water resources on the planet. Aquifers contain almost 96 % of the Planet’s freshwater. Globally, 65 % of groundwater is devoted to irrigation, 25 % to the supply of drinking water and 10 % to industry. In many areas, most drinking water is groundwater that up to 80 % in Europe and Russia, and even more in North America and Middle East. Without groundwater which is the largest and more reliable of all freshwater resources, maintaining secure water supplies for drinking, industry and agriculture would be impossible. Due to growing of population, economic activities and agricultural productions, the demand for water resources is rising up and more than 30 countries suffer from serious
chronic water shortage and groundwater use is increasingly to cover the demand. It is reported that the groundwater production in the world has been reached more than 600,000 million tones in 2001 and this production is nearly 165 times larger than that of hard coal and oil productions. Those situations regarding groundwater resources have caused many social groundwater problems such as water level decline, salinization, land subsidence and groundwater pollution in all over the world.

(authors abstract)