Author(s): G. Busico; F. Rama
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Abstract: Groundwater is the main source of freshwater in the world. Broadly, more than half of world’s population depends on subsurface water for any kind of utilizations such as drinking, irrigation, domestic and industrial purposes. The year 2022 has been proclaimed as the year of groundwater resources with the slogan “Making the invisible visible: 2022, the year of groundwater” pointing out as groundwater is also a vulnerable resource, which requires a forward-looking approach in its management. Accordingly, assessing intrinsic aquifer vulnerability to pollutant leaching represents a key preventive tool in terms of screening and management. Recently, vulnerability assessments have started to be developed at very big scale worldwide and pan continental maps of groundwater vulnerability have been yet developed in Europe (Kumar et al., 2020) and Africa (Ouedraogo et al., 2016). In South America, aquifer vulnerability has attracted the attention of researcher only in the last two decades, having most of the indexed works published in the last 10 years. Despite land use change is a main and actual topic for groundwater depletion in South America, aquifer vulnerability and water quality degradation, are two environmental topics only recently well understood. This work shows the first vulnerability assessment of groundwater in South America realized by Rama et al. (2022) which provides a single continental map that maximizes the local resolution of hydrogeological features to allows a consistent cross-boundary management of the risk.
Year: 2022