Integrated Groundwater Management ─ Concepts, Approaches and Challenges

The aim of the book is to document for the first time the dimensions and requirements of good integrated groundwater management. Groundwater management is a formidable challenge and should be one of humanity’s foremost priorities. Given past and current rates of over-extraction, groundwater is largely a non-renewable resource in many parts of the world. The issue is how we manage this crucial resource in an acceptable way that considers the sustainability of the resource for future generations and the socioeconomic and environmental impacts. In many cases this means restoring a degree of equilibrium to at-risk aquifers.There are many, often-interrelated dimensions to managing groundwater effectively. It is important to get the science and social science right, to work on, and with, the policy framework, and to ensure the wider community, and stakeholders in areas of concern, support and participate in making the challenging decisions. Generally speaking, pursuing an integrated approach will mean considering the wider context of surface water and catchment management. Each chapter in this book makes a clear distinction between the methods currently practiced for groundwater Management and those of IWRM. The book provides an overview of the dimensions and requirements of groundwater management, from an international perspective, i.e. what practitioners and researchers need to bear in mind about groundwater management as the preservation of a shared global resource. The book is divided into five sections, each of which addresses concepts, approaches and difficulties in the application of methods for the management of groundwater. Section 1 highlights the scale of the groundwater issues internationally: the level of exploitation and the resultant pressure quantitatively and qualitatively. Section 2 discusses groundwater governance issues with regard to strategies, policies and institutions for integrated water Management while Section 3 discusses biophysical aspects including the capacity and role of our hydroecological and hydrogeological science and the need for ecological assessments. Section 4 particularly discusses water quality concerns and its management within the broader as well as within the social economic context. Section 5 deals with the current state of modeling and decision-making support system and how to deal with data and uncertainty issues.

Tony Jakeman is Professor, Fenner School of Environment and Society and Director of the Integrated Catchment Assessment and Management (iCAM) Centre, The Australian National University. He has been an Environmental Modeller with the ANU for over 30 years and has over 300 publications in the open literature, half of these in refereed international journals. Since 1997 he has also directed the iCAM Centre pursuing methods and applications of integrated assessment and decision support. He leads the Integration and Decision Support Program of the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training.

Other scientific and organisational activities include: Editor-in-Chief, Environmental Modelling and Software; Foundation President, International Environmental Modelling and Software Society; President, Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand, Inc.; Vice-President, International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation; Board of Directors, The Integrated Assessment Society; and regularly a member of scientific advisory committees of international conferences.

In 2011 he received the Silver Medal of Masaryk University for contributions to environmental modelling and software. In 2012 he was awarded the Ray Page Lifetime Achievement Award from Simulation Australia.