Newly published research by civil and environmental engineering associate professor Megan Konar investigates the stability of groundwater supplies throughout urban areas of China. With high-resolution groundwater analysis, Konar and her colleagues examined the threats facing urban water systems, and found that oftentimes, municipalities are up against multiple groundwater challenges.
Groundwater makes up an essential part of urban water supplies throughout the world. As strain on water systems continues to grow, groundwater sources face two main challenges: depletion and contamination. Though researchers acknowledge these threats exist, they do not yet fully grasp the impact supply shortages and quality violations could have on a cities’ water supply, both in the distant and not-so-distant future.
Using high-resolution groundwater modeling and analysis of recently compiled water-quality violation datasets, Konar and team investigated instances of depletion and contamination across all of China. Their results showed that 180 cities, accounting for over 311 million people, faced at least one of the two groundwater pressures between 2016 and 2021. They additionally found that 40 cities were experiencing both issues simultaneously.
With a logistic regression model, the team also sought an explanation for why these two issues have apparently become conflated in certain areas. They found that oftentimes, both groundwater depletion and contamination are associated with a given area’s natural water endowment, as well as anthropogenic factors. Of these anthropogenic factors, socioeconomic status had the greatest influence, with larger and wealthier cities being much less likely to encounter either scarcity, contamination or the convergence of the two.
Konar hopes this research will shed light on the growing frequency of urban groundwater stress in China, The full paper, “Urban groundwater supplies facing dual pressures of depletion and contamination in China” was published in PNAS and can be read here.