China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Legal principles and legal frameworks related to groundwater
Published in Karen G. Villholth, Elena López-Gunn, Kirstin I. Conti, Alberto Garrido, Jac van der Gun, Advances in Groundwater Governance, 2017
The term “conjunctive use” of surface and groundwater has several different meanings but basically stands for maximizing the beneficial use and economic benefits of both surface water and groundwater through coordinated use. Methods include augmentation of supplies, allocation of costs, managed aquifer recharge and storage of surface water underground, and the coordination of rights reflecting the interconnection between the two kinds of sources. Mature groundwater governance systems have adapted available regulatory instruments to enable conjunctive use practices, and to reap the relevant benefits. In the Western states of the United States, for instance, the rule of prior appropriation whereby s/he who is first in taking water from a source has priority to keep taking it as a matter of right, is applied to interconnected surface and groundwater. As a result, priorities of rights to the use of interconnected waters are correlated and subject to a single set of priorities that encompasses the whole common water supply. In practice, new abstraction permits can be refused in the area, permissible total withdrawals can be apportioned among appropriators, junior appropriators can be restricted or curtailed in their withdrawals, the extraction and use of groundwater can be subjected to a rotation system and well spacing requirements can be introduced for new wells. By no means is conjunctive use predicated on the rule of prior appropriation. For conjunctive use is practised elsewhere in the United States where prior appropriation does not control. In the state of Texas (USA), for instance, irrigators using groundwater can move return flows to natural surface streams and divert and use such flows further downstream, without fear of losing their water as a result of seemingly abandoning it. In the states of California and Arizona (USA) water users may store excess water underground when there is surplus flow available. The water is recharged underground subject to call or trade when needed. In addition, Arizona law allows any person to carry out groundwater recharge projects in return for groundwater recharge credits – something resembling a groundwater “banking” mechanism. These credits may either be used by the recharger or sold to other water users. Arizona law further allows a person to deliver water directly to a farmer to be used by that farmer in lieu of water he would have pumped from under the ground (known as “in lieu recharge”). This effectively leaves underground the groundwater the farmer would have pumped. The “in lieu” recharger receives groundwater credits which again can be used by the recharger or traded (Burchi, 1999).
State of future water regimes in the world’s river basins: balancing the water between society and nature
Published in Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology, 2019
Water stewardship and governance are widely recognized to improve water security in world’s river basins. Some progresses have already been made for provision of basic water and sanitation services to the basin community through improvement of water stewardship and governance (Eliasson, 2015). However, there are broader challenges for overall management issues in securing water. It has been argued that the effectiveness of existing governance, in the face of trends such as the unsustainable use of water resources, the increasing pressure exerted by climate change, or the implications of population growth for water use for food and energy production is insufficient (Hanjra & Qureshi, 2010). Missing links in the trajectories of policy development are one of the major reasons for relative ineffectiveness of water governance (Pahl-Wostl, Conca, et al., 2013). The past trajectories are crucial for learning and improving the future management practices of water resources (Pahl-Wostl, Palmer, & Richards, 2013). However, due to complex nature of freshwater system, the water resources available in the river basins may undergo frequent transitions over temporal scales, depending on how the system is influenced by markets and policy intervention and the dynamics and attitude of social organizations on resource utilization (Folke et al., 2004). Water markets policy supports a healthy economy, along with improving the efficiency of water use and water infrastructure system in river basins (Escriva-Bou, McCann, Hanak, Lund, & Gray, 2016). For example, groundwater banking initiative in the USA, which involves storage of surface water in aquifers during wet years, is used for marketing purposes during dry years to resolve critical water shortages issues and help water reforms (Connell-Buck, Medellín-Azuara, Lund, & Madani, 2011; Grafton et al., 2013).