Groundwater security: a review of national and international studies

Abstract

Groundwater Security is a crucial aspect of Water Security for sustaining the water supply and human activities, which is essential for the development of a region and society. This work presents a bibliographical review of studies related to groundwater security by searching for articles with the keywords “water security”, “groundwater”, and “aquifer”, in the Scopus, Compedex, and Web of Science databases between 2019 and 2023. The study examined 351 articles stored in the Zotero reference manager and analyzed them using the VOSViewer software and electronic spreadsheets. Around 70 articles are produced per year on the subject. The
most discussed topics in these articles are related to the water budget, water quantity and quality, and the evolution of land use and occupation in semi-arid and/or populated regions. The countries with a significant number of articles are China, India, the United States, and Brazil. South Africa and Iran are among the countries with the highest number of citations due to their well-known cases of acute water resource shortages in semi-arid to arid climates. Hydrological methods, which involve analyzing time series of rainfall and river flow, are used with a focus on basic runoff combined with remote sensing techniques. This study examined in greater detail the articles that focus on groundwater availability, associated with increased demand due to population growth, groundwater quality, and its impacts. A more recent trend is the use of coupled models aimed at estimating the water balance of an area (watershed), simulating the flow of rivers, and developing scenarios (both optimistic and pessimistic) for the management of water resources. Concerning water quality, quality indices (various methods) and their cartography stand out, based on the overlapping of vulnerability areas with land use and occupation. Governance studies consist of socio-economic evaluations in areas of water use conflicts, as well as the development of sustainability indicators to support management decisions. The systematic review of the literature revealed that studies being developed in Brazil have kept pace with the most modern techniques and approaches being used in international studies.