Blog post 6: Don't forget about aquifers

To enhance last week’s post on transboundary water resources, this entry will briefly discuss shared sub-surface resources. The video below introduces groundwater in Africa and highlights the associated opportunities and challenges:

Groundwater accounts for >80% of sub-Saharan Africa’s domestic rural water supply (Calow et al. 2010).  Yet, people are not always aware of its transboundary nature (fig.1) as, unlike rivers, aquifers cannot be seen.  Thus, groundwater consumers may also be unaware of who else uses the aquifer or the impacts their use/contamination has elsewhere. So, whilst there is less explicit conflict over groundwater (Kulkarni and Aslekar 2018), there is perhaps more potential for political disputes. Moreover, with climate change leading to higher evaporative losses of surface waters (Serdeczny et al. 2017) but increasing groundwater recharge due to fewer but heavier rainfall events (Owor et al. 2009), groundwater is likely to become an increasingly relied-upon water resource. 

Figure 1. Map of aquifers in Africa shared by one or more countries. Important to note that aquifers are not only transboundary in the sense that they are shared by different countries (as in figure), but also may transcend different communities and rural/urban areas. Source

Understanding this resource is key for successful, sustainable, management and to prevent conflict. However, empirical work on groundwater is relatively limited (Pavelic et al. 2012); it’s hard to know how much water there is and how it’s being used (where and at what rate). This makes developing sharing agreements difficult and hard to enforce. Nonetheless, current transboundary groundwater legislation in Africa does exist (see Matsumoto 2002; Altchenko and Villholth 2019). Whilst these agreements acknowledge the importance of groundwater, more specific regulations around the management of aquifers (Murcia 2020), both across and within countries, is needed.