Ground water and climate change

Groundwater is of crucial importance for water and food security and for sustaining ecosystems. This Review assesses the likely impacts of climate change on groundwater and groundwater-driven feedbacks to the climate system. As the world's largest distributed store of fresh water, ground water...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature climate change 2013-04, Vol.3 (4), p.322-329
Main Authors: Taylor, Richard G., Scanlon, Bridget, Döll, Petra, Rodell, Matt, van Beek, Rens, Wada, Yoshihide, Longuevergne, Laurent, Leblanc, Marc, Famiglietti, James S., Edmunds, Mike, Konikow, Leonard, Green, Timothy R., Chen, Jianyao, Taniguchi, Makoto, Bierkens, Marc F. P., MacDonald, Alan, Fan, Ying, Maxwell, Reed M., Yechieli, Yossi, Gurdak, Jason J., Allen, Diana M., Shamsudduha, Mohammad, Hiscock, Kevin, Yeh, Pat J.-F., Holman, Ian, Treidel, Holger
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
704/106/242
704/106/694
Climate adaptation
Climate Change
Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts
Climate system
Climate variability
Drought
Environment
Environmental Law/Policy/Ecojustice
Environmental problems
Food security
Groundwater
Human ecology and demography
review-article
Sociology
Soil moisture
Surface water
Water resources
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Groundwater is of crucial importance for water and food security and for sustaining ecosystems. This Review assesses the likely impacts of climate change on groundwater and groundwater-driven feedbacks to the climate system. As the world's largest distributed store of fresh water, ground water plays a central part in sustaining ecosystems and enabling human adaptation to climate variability and change. The strategic importance of ground water for global water and food security will probably intensify under climate change as more frequent and intense climate extremes (droughts and floods) increase variability in precipitation, soil moisture and surface water. Here we critically review recent research assessing the impacts of climate on ground water through natural and human-induced processes as well as through groundwater-driven feedbacks on the climate system. Furthermore, we examine the possible opportunities and challenges of using and sustaining groundwater resources in climate adaptation strategies, and highlight the lack of groundwater observations, which, at present, limits our understanding of the dynamic relationship between ground water and climate.
ISSN:1758-678X
1758-6798
DOI:10.1038/nclimate1744