Published November 25, 2012
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Ground water and climate change

Creators

  • 1. University College London
  • 2. University of Texas at Austin
  • 3. Goethe University Frankfurt
  • 4. Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 5. NASA
  • 6. Utrecht University
  • 7. University of Rennes
  • 8. James Cook University
  • 9. University of California, Irvine
  • 10. University of Oxford
  • 11. United States Geological Survey
  • 12. United States Department of Agriculture
  • 13. Sun Yat-sen University
  • 14. National Institutes for the Humanities, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature
  • 15. British Geological Survey
  • 16. Rutgers University
  • 17. Colorado School of Mines
  • 18. Geological Survey of Israel
  • 19. San Francisco State University
  • 20. Simon Fraser University
  • 21. University of East Anglia
  • 22. UNESCO
  • 23. Cranfield University
  • 24. UNESCO-IHP

Description

As the world's largest distributed store of fresh water, ground water plays a central part in sustaining ecosystems and enabling human adaptation to climate variability and change. The strategic importance of ground water for global water and food security will probably intensify under climate change as more frequent and intense climate extremes (droughts and floods) increase variability in precipitation, soil moisture and surface water. Here we critically review recent research assessing the impacts of climate on ground water through natural and human-induced processes as well as through groundwater-driven feedbacks on the climate system. Furthermore, we examine the possible opportunities and challenges of using and sustaining groundwater resources in climate adaptation strategies, and highlight the lack of groundwater observations, which, at present, limits our understanding of the dynamic relationship between ground water and climate.
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