Depleting groundwater resources mitigating surface freshwater scarcity – a trend in the recent past

During the past decades, human water use more than doubled, yet available surface freshwater resources are finite. As a result, water scarcity has become prevalent in many (semi-)arid regions of the world (e.g., India, Pakistan, North East China, the MENA region). In such regions, the demand often exceeds the available surface freshwater resources primarily due to heavy irrigation which requires large volumes of water in a certain time of the year, when groundwater is additionally used to supplement the deficiency. Excessive groundwater pumping, however, often leads to overexploitation, i.e. groundwater abstraction exceeding groundwater recharge. Here, we quantified globally the impact of depleting groundwater resources on mitigating surface freshwater scarcity and the trend between 1960 and 2000 at a spatial resolution of 0.5 degree. We downscaled available country statistics of groundwater abstraction to 0.5 degree, while we simulated groundwater recharge with the global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB at the same spatial resolution considering not only natural groundwater recharge but also artificial recharge, i.e. return flow from irrigation. Water scarcity was estimated by confronting computed water demand for livestock, irrigation, industry and households with simulated surface freshwater availability (PCR-GLOBWB) at 0.5 degree. We thus performed a simulation run with/without groundwater pumping to assess the impact on alleviating surface freshwater scarcity. The results indicated that in many of (semi-)arid regions (e.g., North Wet India, North East Pakistan, North East China, West and Central USA, Central Mexico, North Iran, Central Saudi Arabia) large amounts of groundwater abstraction significantly mitigates the intensity of surface freshwater scarcity, while depleting the resources. Our estimate of global groundwater depletion reached close to 280 km3/yr. In most of the MENA region, the intensity of surface freshwater scarcity was eased by 30% up to 50% as a result of groundwater mining for the year 2000. The simulation of past trend suggests that available surface freshwater resources have become extensively exploited, primarily for irrigation, particularly in (semi-)arid regions since the mid-1980s. Consequently, groundwater pumping has increased rapidly to meet the demand, resulting in an increasing dependency on depleting groundwater resources in recent years. Groundwater resources are vulnerable, yet indispensable for many of (semi-)arid regions, where surface freshwater availability is extremely limited while water demand is rising