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Hydrology and the looming water crisis: It is time to think, and act, outside the box

Hydrology and the looming water crisis: It is time to think, and act, outside the box or list of keywords. In other words, in only one journal (HESS) did the portion of articles dealing with critical water-related issues get to about a fifth of the total number of published articles in that journal, while 80% pursue business as usual! There are probably several ways to look at these numbers. Nevertheless, they suggest that, for whatever reasons (the legitimate fear to appear as ambulance chasers might be one), hydrologists and water resources experts are reluctant to frame their research openly within the context of any of the water-related debates of the moment, at least when they write articles. And yet, the problems that we are likely to face in this area are formidably daunting. According to many experts, we are heading straight for a major global water crisis, which will affect all parts of the planet in one way or another. Many authors have written on the issue (e.g., Fendeková and Fendek, 2012; Hanel et al., 2012; Hanjra and Qureshi, 2010; Jury and Vaux, 2005, 2007; McDonald, 2011; Nmecková et al., 2012; Schwartz and Ibaraki, 2011). Jury and Vaux (2007) have summarized the situation very clearly: "In the absence of coordinat- ed planning and international cooperation at an unprecedented scale, the next half century will be plagued by a host of severe water-related problems, threatening the well being of many terrestrial ecosystems and drastically impairing human health, particularly in the poorest regions of the world." A recent and well-documented report (Corcoran et al., 2010) shows that conditions are dire already in many areas, both in terms of water quality and quantity. Overall statistics are that almost 900 million people do not have access to safe water. Some 2.6 billion, roughly half the population of the developing world, do not have access to adequate sanitation. In spite of the general impression often given by the press, more people are currently dying from poor water quality than from war, terrorism, and other forms of violence (Corcoran et al., 2010). In terms of water quantity, one fifth of the world's population, or 1.2 billion people, live in areas of water scarcity, and this number is projected to reach 3 billion by 2025 as water stress and populations increase. As large as they are, these numbers may still underestimate the true extent of the problems in some parts of the world (e.g., Zawahri et al., 2011). Some of the problems related to the availability of water resources in large enough quantities and of sufficient quality are long-standing. However, a number of severe problems have appeared only in the last ten years. Among them, one of the most significant is related to the exploitation of shale gases. Shale formations in various parts of the world (Fig. 1) have been known for a long time to contain significant amounts of natural gas, but in the past only shallow, fractured shale formations could be exploited economically. A technique known as "hydraulic fracturing" or "fracking", developed right after WWII, allowed natural gas from artificially-fractured, deeper shale formations to be recovered, yet the need to drill multiple vertical wells to large depths made the process too costly. In the early 2000s, major technological breakthroughs in terms of horizontal drilling (Fig. 2), combined with hydraulic fracturing, for the first time allowed access to large volumes of untapped shale gas resources, and led to a massive increase in exploration and drilling (Kargbo et al., 2010; Mooney, 2011) . Fig. 1. Map of world shale gas resources assessed by the United States Energy Information Administration. (Adapted from EIA, 2011.) Fig. 2. Schematic of the process of hydraulic fracturing to exploit shale gas in the Marcellus shale in the Northeast of the US. (Adapted from Issue 5 of Chevron's magazine Next, September 2012.) Ever since, public opinion has been extremely polarized on the topic, all over the world. Gas and oil companies, standing to derive trillions of dollars from exploitation of shale gas, have lobbied extensively to promote it, and are willing to invest heavily into new operations, as is demonstrated by last year's 4.5 billion dollars investments of French and Chinese gas companies into the development of US gas shales. Governments also stand to benefit from the operation, in the form of taxes or increased energetic self-reliance, as well as from the fact that natural gas may be used as a "bridge" until renewable, nonfossil energy sources become more economically appealing to policy-makers than they are for the time being. In the US, where real estate owners have full subsurface mineral rights, individuals in economically depressed areas tend to see in fracking an unexpected bonanza and have committed in droves to gas production under their land. On the other hand, environmentalists from different horizons have raised numerous questions about potentially severe environmental risks associated with drilling and fracking operations. The very high spatial density of wells needed to exploit shale gas, the large amounts of water needed to frack, the release in surface waters and waste water streams of hundreds of often extremely toxic (cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting) chemicals used in fracking, the heavy truck traffic associated with the transport of these chemicals and of the gas, the risk of directly or indirectly contaminating shallow aquifers, and more recently, earthquake hazards, are among the many causes for alarm that environmentalists raise (Entrekin et al., 2011; Rozell and Reaven, 2012). Some of these environmental concerns might be resolved if gas companies adopted a different technique to fracture shales, for example a technology that does not use water, but employs liquid CO2 or some other liquid instead (Rogala et al., 2013). However, unless someone invented an ingenious device that can be lowered into the shale itself and can collect and purify the natural gas in situ, all problems would not be resolved and worries would still persist. Indeed, many industry reports indicate that the portion of the gas wells near the soil surface, which passes through aquifers (Fig. 2), has issues of its own. Fig. 3. Wells with sustained casing pressure (SCP) by age. Statistics are from the United States Mineral Management Service (MMS) show the percentage of wells with SCP for wells in the outer continental shelf area of the Gulf of Mexico, grouped by age of wells. (From Brufatto et al., 2003.) After a well is drilled and before it starts producing, a number of concentric cement casings are poured in place around the well pipes. The integrity of these casings is crucial to the protection of groundwater resources. Unfortunately, the drilling industry, and in particular, its world leader, Schlumberger, acknowledge that well cementing is fraught with technical problems: "Despite recent advances in the cementing of oil and gas wells, many of today's wells are at risk." (Nelson et al., 2006). Brufatto et al. (2003) describe in detail some of the possible causes of uncontrolled gas migration in a traditional gas well, and conclude that "Since the earliest gas wells, uncontrolled migration of hydrocarbons to the surface has challenged the oil and gas industry. Gas migration, also called annular flow, can lead to sustained casing pressure (SCP), sometimes called sustained annular pressure (SAP). [...] Annular flow and SCP are significant problems affecting wells in many hydrocarbon-producing regions of the world." The statistics that Brufatto et al. (2003) present suggest that at the time of construction of the casings, about 5% of them fail, i.e., show signs of SCP. After a few years, this proportion increases rapidly, to reach close to 60% after 18 years (see Fig. 3). This means that in a region like the northeast US, where hundreds of thousands of drillings are planned, there could easily be five to ten thousand wells leaking natural gas and a cocktail of hundreds of toxic, sometimes radioactive, chemicals into neighboring aquifers, right when the exploitation of the shale gas starts. As many as a hundred thousand wells might be leaking a few years later, even if at that point the wells have been capped. As large as it is, this estimate may still be conservative; the water moving upward in wells in the case of shale gas production is likely to be acidic and laden with H2S (because of the activity of sulfate reducers in the shale), which is expected to threaten the integrity of well cement casings even more than in regular gas or oil wells. This very pessimistic outlook should encourage the community of hydrologists and water resources specialists to think about possible actions. One possibility is to educate policymaker about the uncharted risks involved in drilling through aquifers with a technology that is still untested, and does not appear currently to be sufficiently robust. Beyond that, it is clear that "baseline" data of surface water and, whenever feasible, groundwater quality are needed urgently in the parts of the world where shale gas exploitation is envisaged. In many cases, such baseline monitoring data do not exist at all. Surface water quality data could be obtained without significant financial support, for example in the context of practical exercises associated with hydrology or water resources courses taught in universities. Students could be trained to take samples and analyze them, in the process contributing to build a data library that could be used at a later date to detect and quantify the extent of water contamination, if and when it happens. The monitoring of groundwater quality is trickier, in that it requires significant funding, which at the moment is not available in many countries. Perhaps, on a case-by-case basis, we could piggy-back on unrelated research projects dealing with groundwater resources, and add to them a component of water quality monitoring that could provide needed baseline data in regions overlaying shale formations. In the broader scheme of things, we should probably be concerned also about parts of the world where there are conflicting demands on water, whether it be within a given region our country, or among neighboring nations (Darnault, 2008). Indeed, there is something that makes water-related conflicts particularly tricky for human societies to resolve, and often leads them to escalate... Water is the only natural resource (besides air) without which humans absolutely cannot cope. A reasonably constituted person can easily operate for one or two weeks without eating anything, but cannot survive very long without drinking water. This requirement, at the individual level, puts a premium on access to sufficient water resources, of adequate quality. At the level of populations, especially when it is combined by the vital needs of agriculture and industry for water, the vital requirement to have access to water helps explain why governments are at times adopting drastic measures to guarantee access to water resources, sometimes in ways that puts them on collision courses with neighboring countries. A vivid example in this respect is afforded by the Colorado river in North America, which is a sizeable river when it goes through the Grand Canyon, but is generally reduced to a mere trickling when it crosses the border into Mexico, in spite of protracted complaints by Mexicans that the US are unfairly appropriating all the water. Probably an even clearer example of how far some groups of individuals are willing to go to satisfy their water consumption needs is what has been unfolding in Palestine over the last 45 years. The geology of the region is such that several aquifer basins are located under the West Bank: the Western, Northeastern and Eastern basins, which collectively constitute the Mountain Aquifer (Fig. 4a). Other key sources of the water in the region are the Jordan River, and the Coastal aquifer. The geological formation in which the mountain aquifer is located has a pronounced slope toward the west (Fig. 4b), with the practical consequence that the best locations to drill in the upper part of the western aquifer, as well as in the lower part, are located immediately east of the 1949 Armistice Line, i.e., in what by law should be Palestinian land. Estimates of the abstracting costs per Mm3 of groundwater per year demonstrate clearly that a number of very economical drilling locations (in Tulkarem and Qalqilya) are in Palestine (Fig. 4c). Argually to prevent terrorist incursions in Israel, the Israeli government (against the opinion of a very vocal but minority segment of its population) has built an 8 metres-tall wall, known as the "Israeli West Bank Barrier" or in Europe as the "wall of shame", which separates the West Bank from Israel. In fact, the siting of this wall in many places makes little sense unless it is meant to deprive Palestinians from access precisely to the parts of the West Bank where abstracting groundwater from the Western Aquifer is most convenient and Fig. 4. a) Map showing the three mountain aquifer sub-basins and their average potential as defined in the interim agreement (adapted from Zeitoun et al., 2009). b) Schematic cross section of the Western Aquifer Basin from approximately Tel Aviv (west) to Ramallah (east). The coastal aquifer is also shown (adapted from McDonald et al., 2009). c) Groundwater development costs in the Lower Mountain Aquifer (adapted from McDonald et al., 2009). d) Map of Palestinian and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, showing the location of the wall as of 2009 (reproduced from Amnesty International, 2009). cheapest (Fig. 4d). In other locations, the construction of the wall itself has allowed the Israeli contractors to destroy Palestinian wells, or separate agricultural fields from the wells used traditionally to irrigate them. The upshot of numerous decisions made by successive Israeli governments over the past decades is that most of the large water resources underneath the Westbank are not accessible to Palestinians. This situation has been condemned by numerous international organisations like the UN or Amnesty International (2009), foreign governmental institutions like the French parliament (Luca and Glavany, 2011), as well as numerous observers and researchers (e.g., Brooks and Lihton, 2011; Brooks and Trottier, 2010; Frederiksen, 2005; Hamdan et.al., 2011; MacDonald et al., 2009; Shomar, 2011; Tamimi, 2011; Zawahri et al., 2011; Zeitoun et al., 2009), to no avail. At the moment (see Fig. 5), Israel takes 100% of the water from the Jordan River, 83% of the water from the Mountain aquifer, as well as 82% of the coastal aquifer, leaving for Gaza only very limited groundwater resources, of such poor quality that it causes significant health problems (Abbas et al., 2013). In many villages in the Best Bank as well as in Gaza, where water rationing is the rule, the amount of water available per capita per day is significantly below what the World Health Organization considers to be the minimum required to preserve satisfactory health. At the same time, Israeli settlers in the occupied territories enjoy unrestricted water supplies of over 300 liters per day per capita, well above WHO recommendations. Fig. 5. Visual depiction of the appropriation of groundwater resources by the Israeli http://www.thirstingforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/ 03/WBL1.jpg; last accessed: April 30, 2013). government (source: Certainly this situation in Palestine is extreme. Very few other governments would be willing, like the various right-wing governments of Israel over the past few decades, to ignore the opinion of most of the rest of the world, lose any moral credibility in the process, and engage in practices that are not only humanly reprehensible, but so clearly promote hatred and violence. Nevertheless, in other countries around the world, situations where surface- and groundwater resources need to be shared are extremely numerous and could turn out to be equally volatile if one is not careful. Hydrologists and water resources experts can help greatly diffuse some of the potentially explosive tensions that this sharing may generate. We can for example monitor carefully the use of the surface and groundwater resources, and make sure that it is within sustainable bounds. We can also monitor the quality of the water, and ensure that possible sources of pollution are avoided or at least minimized. By demonstrating that in many cases, current uses of groundwater particularly are not sustainable (Anderson et al., 2012), hydrologists could also play a very significant role in leading a reflection on how we could do things differently, without consuming as much water as we do now. There are many possible routes to follow in this respect. One of them has to do with agriculture. For millenia, with very few exceptions, human societies have assumed that food needed to be produced on land. As rain becomes more erratic, at least in part of the world, and groundwater resources get overexploited, the time may have come to inquire whether, if one dares think "outside the box", a very different outlook is possible. From a resource allocation perspective, fully recognizing that water is as important, if not more important, to crop production than a soil material in which crops can propagate their roots, and that water will be scarce in many parts of the world in years to come, one would conclude that it would make sense to try to produce food where the water is. With the rare exception of countries like Brazil, that are blessed with abundant water supplies, in general the requirement to go where the water is would force us naturally to turn to the oceans, which cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface and contain 97 percent of the planet's water. Roughly two thirds of the world population already live in coastal areas around the world, so that deriving food and energy from the oceans would not pose insurmountable logistic problems. In addition, Japan has shown, for centuries, that it is possible to derive sizeable quantities of food from oceans. Different types of seaweed, sea vegetables, and countless fish products, often not consumed in other countries, find their way in the daily diet of the Japanese population. This example has been emulated by China in the last 25 years. Data compiled and reported by Liu and Diamond (2005) suggest that the production of aquacultured seafood has increased markedly since 1985. Some of the increase in production is associated with cultured freshwater operations, which most often use feed derived from land crops like soybeans and therefore do not change fundamentally the population's relationship with soils. Nothing would prevent other countries, with less polluted coastal ecosystems, to jump on the bandwagon and to produce in the oceans, if not human food, at least animal feeds or sea crops that could be eventually converted into biofuels. If this trend toward a more widespread seafarming (Baveye et al., 2011; Radulovich, 2011) or mariculture materialized, soils would be less solicited for food production, and could be reforested to a far greater extent than at present, especially in erodable areas, or could be allowed more generally to be recolonized by their natural vegetation. Hydrologists have important contributions to make in these different areas. The clock is ticking, inexorably. The water crisis that so many observers are forecasting is likely to be upon us before we know it. I hope that hydrologists and groundwater specialists will be ready to respond to the pressing demands society will make upon them in that context. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Hydrology and Hydromechanics de Gruyter

Hydrology and the looming water crisis: It is time to think, and act, outside the box

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de Gruyter
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0042-790X
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10.2478/johh-2013-0012
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Abstract

or list of keywords. In other words, in only one journal (HESS) did the portion of articles dealing with critical water-related issues get to about a fifth of the total number of published articles in that journal, while 80% pursue business as usual! There are probably several ways to look at these numbers. Nevertheless, they suggest that, for whatever reasons (the legitimate fear to appear as ambulance chasers might be one), hydrologists and water resources experts are reluctant to frame their research openly within the context of any of the water-related debates of the moment, at least when they write articles. And yet, the problems that we are likely to face in this area are formidably daunting. According to many experts, we are heading straight for a major global water crisis, which will affect all parts of the planet in one way or another. Many authors have written on the issue (e.g., Fendeková and Fendek, 2012; Hanel et al., 2012; Hanjra and Qureshi, 2010; Jury and Vaux, 2005, 2007; McDonald, 2011; Nmecková et al., 2012; Schwartz and Ibaraki, 2011). Jury and Vaux (2007) have summarized the situation very clearly: "In the absence of coordinat- ed planning and international cooperation at an unprecedented scale, the next half century will be plagued by a host of severe water-related problems, threatening the well being of many terrestrial ecosystems and drastically impairing human health, particularly in the poorest regions of the world." A recent and well-documented report (Corcoran et al., 2010) shows that conditions are dire already in many areas, both in terms of water quality and quantity. Overall statistics are that almost 900 million people do not have access to safe water. Some 2.6 billion, roughly half the population of the developing world, do not have access to adequate sanitation. In spite of the general impression often given by the press, more people are currently dying from poor water quality than from war, terrorism, and other forms of violence (Corcoran et al., 2010). In terms of water quantity, one fifth of the world's population, or 1.2 billion people, live in areas of water scarcity, and this number is projected to reach 3 billion by 2025 as water stress and populations increase. As large as they are, these numbers may still underestimate the true extent of the problems in some parts of the world (e.g., Zawahri et al., 2011). Some of the problems related to the availability of water resources in large enough quantities and of sufficient quality are long-standing. However, a number of severe problems have appeared only in the last ten years. Among them, one of the most significant is related to the exploitation of shale gases. Shale formations in various parts of the world (Fig. 1) have been known for a long time to contain significant amounts of natural gas, but in the past only shallow, fractured shale formations could be exploited economically. A technique known as "hydraulic fracturing" or "fracking", developed right after WWII, allowed natural gas from artificially-fractured, deeper shale formations to be recovered, yet the need to drill multiple vertical wells to large depths made the process too costly. In the early 2000s, major technological breakthroughs in terms of horizontal drilling (Fig. 2), combined with hydraulic fracturing, for the first time allowed access to large volumes of untapped shale gas resources, and led to a massive increase in exploration and drilling (Kargbo et al., 2010; Mooney, 2011) . Fig. 1. Map of world shale gas resources assessed by the United States Energy Information Administration. (Adapted from EIA, 2011.) Fig. 2. Schematic of the process of hydraulic fracturing to exploit shale gas in the Marcellus shale in the Northeast of the US. (Adapted from Issue 5 of Chevron's magazine Next, September 2012.) Ever since, public opinion has been extremely polarized on the topic, all over the world. Gas and oil companies, standing to derive trillions of dollars from exploitation of shale gas, have lobbied extensively to promote it, and are willing to invest heavily into new operations, as is demonstrated by last year's 4.5 billion dollars investments of French and Chinese gas companies into the development of US gas shales. Governments also stand to benefit from the operation, in the form of taxes or increased energetic self-reliance, as well as from the fact that natural gas may be used as a "bridge" until renewable, nonfossil energy sources become more economically appealing to policy-makers than they are for the time being. In the US, where real estate owners have full subsurface mineral rights, individuals in economically depressed areas tend to see in fracking an unexpected bonanza and have committed in droves to gas production under their land. On the other hand, environmentalists from different horizons have raised numerous questions about potentially severe environmental risks associated with drilling and fracking operations. The very high spatial density of wells needed to exploit shale gas, the large amounts of water needed to frack, the release in surface waters and waste water streams of hundreds of often extremely toxic (cancer-causing, endocrine-disrupting) chemicals used in fracking, the heavy truck traffic associated with the transport of these chemicals and of the gas, the risk of directly or indirectly contaminating shallow aquifers, and more recently, earthquake hazards, are among the many causes for alarm that environmentalists raise (Entrekin et al., 2011; Rozell and Reaven, 2012). Some of these environmental concerns might be resolved if gas companies adopted a different technique to fracture shales, for example a technology that does not use water, but employs liquid CO2 or some other liquid instead (Rogala et al., 2013). However, unless someone invented an ingenious device that can be lowered into the shale itself and can collect and purify the natural gas in situ, all problems would not be resolved and worries would still persist. Indeed, many industry reports indicate that the portion of the gas wells near the soil surface, which passes through aquifers (Fig. 2), has issues of its own. Fig. 3. Wells with sustained casing pressure (SCP) by age. Statistics are from the United States Mineral Management Service (MMS) show the percentage of wells with SCP for wells in the outer continental shelf area of the Gulf of Mexico, grouped by age of wells. (From Brufatto et al., 2003.) After a well is drilled and before it starts producing, a number of concentric cement casings are poured in place around the well pipes. The integrity of these casings is crucial to the protection of groundwater resources. Unfortunately, the drilling industry, and in particular, its world leader, Schlumberger, acknowledge that well cementing is fraught with technical problems: "Despite recent advances in the cementing of oil and gas wells, many of today's wells are at risk." (Nelson et al., 2006). Brufatto et al. (2003) describe in detail some of the possible causes of uncontrolled gas migration in a traditional gas well, and conclude that "Since the earliest gas wells, uncontrolled migration of hydrocarbons to the surface has challenged the oil and gas industry. Gas migration, also called annular flow, can lead to sustained casing pressure (SCP), sometimes called sustained annular pressure (SAP). [...] Annular flow and SCP are significant problems affecting wells in many hydrocarbon-producing regions of the world." The statistics that Brufatto et al. (2003) present suggest that at the time of construction of the casings, about 5% of them fail, i.e., show signs of SCP. After a few years, this proportion increases rapidly, to reach close to 60% after 18 years (see Fig. 3). This means that in a region like the northeast US, where hundreds of thousands of drillings are planned, there could easily be five to ten thousand wells leaking natural gas and a cocktail of hundreds of toxic, sometimes radioactive, chemicals into neighboring aquifers, right when the exploitation of the shale gas starts. As many as a hundred thousand wells might be leaking a few years later, even if at that point the wells have been capped. As large as it is, this estimate may still be conservative; the water moving upward in wells in the case of shale gas production is likely to be acidic and laden with H2S (because of the activity of sulfate reducers in the shale), which is expected to threaten the integrity of well cement casings even more than in regular gas or oil wells. This very pessimistic outlook should encourage the community of hydrologists and water resources specialists to think about possible actions. One possibility is to educate policymaker about the uncharted risks involved in drilling through aquifers with a technology that is still untested, and does not appear currently to be sufficiently robust. Beyond that, it is clear that "baseline" data of surface water and, whenever feasible, groundwater quality are needed urgently in the parts of the world where shale gas exploitation is envisaged. In many cases, such baseline monitoring data do not exist at all. Surface water quality data could be obtained without significant financial support, for example in the context of practical exercises associated with hydrology or water resources courses taught in universities. Students could be trained to take samples and analyze them, in the process contributing to build a data library that could be used at a later date to detect and quantify the extent of water contamination, if and when it happens. The monitoring of groundwater quality is trickier, in that it requires significant funding, which at the moment is not available in many countries. Perhaps, on a case-by-case basis, we could piggy-back on unrelated research projects dealing with groundwater resources, and add to them a component of water quality monitoring that could provide needed baseline data in regions overlaying shale formations. In the broader scheme of things, we should probably be concerned also about parts of the world where there are conflicting demands on water, whether it be within a given region our country, or among neighboring nations (Darnault, 2008). Indeed, there is something that makes water-related conflicts particularly tricky for human societies to resolve, and often leads them to escalate... Water is the only natural resource (besides air) without which humans absolutely cannot cope. A reasonably constituted person can easily operate for one or two weeks without eating anything, but cannot survive very long without drinking water. This requirement, at the individual level, puts a premium on access to sufficient water resources, of adequate quality. At the level of populations, especially when it is combined by the vital needs of agriculture and industry for water, the vital requirement to have access to water helps explain why governments are at times adopting drastic measures to guarantee access to water resources, sometimes in ways that puts them on collision courses with neighboring countries. A vivid example in this respect is afforded by the Colorado river in North America, which is a sizeable river when it goes through the Grand Canyon, but is generally reduced to a mere trickling when it crosses the border into Mexico, in spite of protracted complaints by Mexicans that the US are unfairly appropriating all the water. Probably an even clearer example of how far some groups of individuals are willing to go to satisfy their water consumption needs is what has been unfolding in Palestine over the last 45 years. The geology of the region is such that several aquifer basins are located under the West Bank: the Western, Northeastern and Eastern basins, which collectively constitute the Mountain Aquifer (Fig. 4a). Other key sources of the water in the region are the Jordan River, and the Coastal aquifer. The geological formation in which the mountain aquifer is located has a pronounced slope toward the west (Fig. 4b), with the practical consequence that the best locations to drill in the upper part of the western aquifer, as well as in the lower part, are located immediately east of the 1949 Armistice Line, i.e., in what by law should be Palestinian land. Estimates of the abstracting costs per Mm3 of groundwater per year demonstrate clearly that a number of very economical drilling locations (in Tulkarem and Qalqilya) are in Palestine (Fig. 4c). Argually to prevent terrorist incursions in Israel, the Israeli government (against the opinion of a very vocal but minority segment of its population) has built an 8 metres-tall wall, known as the "Israeli West Bank Barrier" or in Europe as the "wall of shame", which separates the West Bank from Israel. In fact, the siting of this wall in many places makes little sense unless it is meant to deprive Palestinians from access precisely to the parts of the West Bank where abstracting groundwater from the Western Aquifer is most convenient and Fig. 4. a) Map showing the three mountain aquifer sub-basins and their average potential as defined in the interim agreement (adapted from Zeitoun et al., 2009). b) Schematic cross section of the Western Aquifer Basin from approximately Tel Aviv (west) to Ramallah (east). The coastal aquifer is also shown (adapted from McDonald et al., 2009). c) Groundwater development costs in the Lower Mountain Aquifer (adapted from McDonald et al., 2009). d) Map of Palestinian and Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, showing the location of the wall as of 2009 (reproduced from Amnesty International, 2009). cheapest (Fig. 4d). In other locations, the construction of the wall itself has allowed the Israeli contractors to destroy Palestinian wells, or separate agricultural fields from the wells used traditionally to irrigate them. The upshot of numerous decisions made by successive Israeli governments over the past decades is that most of the large water resources underneath the Westbank are not accessible to Palestinians. This situation has been condemned by numerous international organisations like the UN or Amnesty International (2009), foreign governmental institutions like the French parliament (Luca and Glavany, 2011), as well as numerous observers and researchers (e.g., Brooks and Lihton, 2011; Brooks and Trottier, 2010; Frederiksen, 2005; Hamdan et.al., 2011; MacDonald et al., 2009; Shomar, 2011; Tamimi, 2011; Zawahri et al., 2011; Zeitoun et al., 2009), to no avail. At the moment (see Fig. 5), Israel takes 100% of the water from the Jordan River, 83% of the water from the Mountain aquifer, as well as 82% of the coastal aquifer, leaving for Gaza only very limited groundwater resources, of such poor quality that it causes significant health problems (Abbas et al., 2013). In many villages in the Best Bank as well as in Gaza, where water rationing is the rule, the amount of water available per capita per day is significantly below what the World Health Organization considers to be the minimum required to preserve satisfactory health. At the same time, Israeli settlers in the occupied territories enjoy unrestricted water supplies of over 300 liters per day per capita, well above WHO recommendations. Fig. 5. Visual depiction of the appropriation of groundwater resources by the Israeli http://www.thirstingforjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/ 03/WBL1.jpg; last accessed: April 30, 2013). government (source: Certainly this situation in Palestine is extreme. Very few other governments would be willing, like the various right-wing governments of Israel over the past few decades, to ignore the opinion of most of the rest of the world, lose any moral credibility in the process, and engage in practices that are not only humanly reprehensible, but so clearly promote hatred and violence. Nevertheless, in other countries around the world, situations where surface- and groundwater resources need to be shared are extremely numerous and could turn out to be equally volatile if one is not careful. Hydrologists and water resources experts can help greatly diffuse some of the potentially explosive tensions that this sharing may generate. We can for example monitor carefully the use of the surface and groundwater resources, and make sure that it is within sustainable bounds. We can also monitor the quality of the water, and ensure that possible sources of pollution are avoided or at least minimized. By demonstrating that in many cases, current uses of groundwater particularly are not sustainable (Anderson et al., 2012), hydrologists could also play a very significant role in leading a reflection on how we could do things differently, without consuming as much water as we do now. There are many possible routes to follow in this respect. One of them has to do with agriculture. For millenia, with very few exceptions, human societies have assumed that food needed to be produced on land. As rain becomes more erratic, at least in part of the world, and groundwater resources get overexploited, the time may have come to inquire whether, if one dares think "outside the box", a very different outlook is possible. From a resource allocation perspective, fully recognizing that water is as important, if not more important, to crop production than a soil material in which crops can propagate their roots, and that water will be scarce in many parts of the world in years to come, one would conclude that it would make sense to try to produce food where the water is. With the rare exception of countries like Brazil, that are blessed with abundant water supplies, in general the requirement to go where the water is would force us naturally to turn to the oceans, which cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface and contain 97 percent of the planet's water. Roughly two thirds of the world population already live in coastal areas around the world, so that deriving food and energy from the oceans would not pose insurmountable logistic problems. In addition, Japan has shown, for centuries, that it is possible to derive sizeable quantities of food from oceans. Different types of seaweed, sea vegetables, and countless fish products, often not consumed in other countries, find their way in the daily diet of the Japanese population. This example has been emulated by China in the last 25 years. Data compiled and reported by Liu and Diamond (2005) suggest that the production of aquacultured seafood has increased markedly since 1985. Some of the increase in production is associated with cultured freshwater operations, which most often use feed derived from land crops like soybeans and therefore do not change fundamentally the population's relationship with soils. Nothing would prevent other countries, with less polluted coastal ecosystems, to jump on the bandwagon and to produce in the oceans, if not human food, at least animal feeds or sea crops that could be eventually converted into biofuels. If this trend toward a more widespread seafarming (Baveye et al., 2011; Radulovich, 2011) or mariculture materialized, soils would be less solicited for food production, and could be reforested to a far greater extent than at present, especially in erodable areas, or could be allowed more generally to be recolonized by their natural vegetation. Hydrologists have important contributions to make in these different areas. The clock is ticking, inexorably. The water crisis that so many observers are forecasting is likely to be upon us before we know it. I hope that hydrologists and groundwater specialists will be ready to respond to the pressing demands society will make upon them in that context.

Journal

Journal of Hydrology and Hydromechanics – de Gruyter

Published: Jun 1, 2013

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