Saturday, November 16, 2013

African Underground Water Resources



UNESCO is the UN agency that focuses on water resources, and it produces a global water assessment. As the map shows, aquifers don't respect national boundaries. Underground water supplies are important for agriculture and for human and household use. Knowledge of the aquifers is important for their proper management.

It sometimes happens that water withdrawn from an aquifer in one country is not available to be withdrawn in a neighbor country. Think of Israel, Palestine and Jordan. Proper management of aquifers and treaties based on agreed knowledge of the properties of aquifers will be increasingly important way to prevent conflict over scarce water supply in the future.

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