Groundwater and the Fate of Humanity

Summary: It is well known that humanity faces a crisis with climate change however there is a second more urgent crisis that humanity is facing. This crisis is freshwater and since groundwater is 99% of all freshwaters it is essentially a groundwater crisis. Of the 17 Sustainability goals formed by the UN, 8 are groundwater dependent. These goals are to be met in 2030. In 2010 the UN passed an additional resolution that safe drinking water is a human right however more than 3 billion people do not yet have access to safe drinking water and sanitation. The second part of the freshwater crisis concerns depletion of aquifers for irrigation. Approximately, 40% of agriculture in the globalized food system comes from irrigation and 70% of this irrigation water is groundwater. We have reached peak global water use at a time when the population is set to increase by another billion people and aquifers are being depleted, many beyond recovery in human time. Hence, we have a global food crisis looming that is dependent upon many factors for which availability of irrigation water will ultimately be a determinant. The third part of the freshwater crisis is contamination. Most groundwater has anthropogenic chemicals, and this is increasing, the health effects are unknown because of the combinations of contaminants. All countries will be impacted by the freshwater crisis, but the impacts will depend very much on the particular region. Policies should be directed at growing more local food. In Canada, 30% of the population relies on well water, mostly rural families, and small communities. This includes 52% percent of our First Nations population which rely on groundwater. Groundwater is responsive to drought and increased rainfall both of which can be problematic. Climate change and continuing contamination is going to increase the impacts on this population. To address this monitoring needs to be increased, well designs need to be modified to be more protective and this segment of the Canadian population needs to become much better informed of the water supply with increased interactions with government organizations. The Groundwater Project has been set up to make these problems better understood including communications with the lay public. Reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gases is of course necessary but this will take decades and the outcomes will be determined over a much longer time span than the outcomes for the water crisis. If the water crisis does not become a global priority the threat of societal collapse becomes large and therefore the prospects for reducing anthropogenic greenhouse gases become nil. Presenters: Dr. John Cherry’s research pioneered the field of groundwater pollution, now known as ‘contaminant hydrogeology’. He co-authored the book Groundwater with R.A. Freeze (1979) and was awarded the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize (Singapore) in 2016 followed by the Stockholm Water Prize in 2020. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and on retirement from the University of Waterloo in 2006 became a Distinguished Emeritus Professor. He is a principal investigator at the Morwick G360 Institute for Groundwater Research at the University of Guelph, Canada. During 2017, he founded and is the leader of The Groundwater Project ([www.gw-project.org]www.gw-project.org), a global philanthropic project aimed at raising groundwater consciousness and strengthening groundwater expertise worldwide, in addition to making groundwater knowledge accessible for everyone everywhere. __________________________________________________________________________________________

Mediasite Presenter

6/13/2023 7:00:00 PM