E-LIBRARY - REFERENCES
Groundwater and Ecosystem Services
June 28, 2015
Unprecedented expansion of
groundwater use for irrigation has
underpinned the agrarian transformation
in South and East Asia and other parts of
the world, like the Middle East, northern
Africa and central Asia, over the past five
decades (Shah et al., 2007).
By promoting
intensification and diversification of land
use, groundwater development has
enhanced socio-economic resilience
of smallholder farming systems and
increased food security.
At the same time, inexorable
pressure on groundwater resources
has threatened the sustainability
of intensive groundwater use in
agriculture (Shah et al., 2007). As a
consequence, the environment and the
livelihoods dependent on ecosystems
linked to groundwater have been
compromised (Danielopol et al., 2003,
Moench, 2003).
An urgent need is to
develop governance and management
regimes that can balance the tradeoffs
between livelihood resilience and
socio-economic development on the
one hand and ecological resilience
of groundwater-dependent agrarian
landscapes on the other. In other
parts of the world, like in sub-Saharan
Africa (Villholth, 2013) and parts
of Southeast Asia (Johnston et al.,
2009), groundwater irrigation is on
the rise among smallholder farmers.
To counteract similar trajectories
in these regions, it is of paramount
importance that previous failures and
shortcomings in governance of these
types of systems be recognized and
accounted for in timely and tailored
governance paradigms in order to
achieve longer-term sustainability and
resilience of these socio-ecologies.
The Water, Land and Ecosystem
(WLE) Program has at its core the
promotion of sustainable intensification
in agriculture through evidence-based
research and policy development.
Fundamental to the achievement of this
goal is the application and uptake of
an ecosystem services and resiliencebased
approach (WLE, 2014).
The
present Framework Document outlines
the WLE conceptual understanding
of groundwater-dependent and
groundwater-impacting ecosystem
services and devises an approach to
guide research and policy development
related to agrarian socio-ecologies highly
dependent on groundwater.
Tags : groundwater , ecosystem , environment , research
