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India is the thirstiest user of groundwater in the world, sucking up more of this valuable resource than both the U.S. and China combined.
Indeed, the country relies on groundwater more than other water sources (like lakes and rivers) to keep its crops irrigated, its industries running, and its people quenched. In some rural communities, as much as 85 percent of their drinking water is pumped from underground. Without groundwater, India would be a totally different country than it is today.
But India’s groundwater is drying out — and it’s not the only country where that’s happening.
India’s 1.45 billion people are among the nearly 6 billion across more than 101 countries that have suffered “unprecedented” terrestrial water loss over the past 22 years, according to a recent study published in Science Advances.
Terrestrial water refers to the freshwater stored on land. Think glaciers and snowpacks, lakes and rivers, canopy and groundwater. But in those continental regions without glaciers, it’s groundwater loss that has been most alarming, accounting for approximately 68 percent of total freshwater declines.
In India, as the number of irrigation wells has skyrocketed in recent decades, aquifers in some regions of the country are becoming dangerously over-exploited. This means way more water is pumped out than is going back in.
In some rural villages, drinking water wells are running dry, requiring the government to truck in water. Over the past few years, around 80 percent of the country’s marginal farmers have suffered crop failures in large part because of depleted groundwater and other climate-related impacts, while nearly 43 percent of farmers saw at least half their standing crops lost.
Many Indian farmers are going out of business. Some are committing suicide.
“Farmers might spend $5,000 to $7,000 to drill a new bore well. That’s about the total income that some of these farmers are making in a year or even two years,” Veena Srinivasan, executive director of WELL Labs, an India-based non-profit that seeks to help turn cutting edge scientific environmental solutions into practical real-world tools, told Truthout.
“They’re essentially wiping out one or two years of income in search of water but [only] have anything between a 33 percent to 50 percent chance of even hitting water in the first place,” said Srinivasan.
It’s cold comfort for India’s farming community, however, that they’re not alone in squaring up to the consequences of critical groundwater loss.
As the planet’s atmosphere has quickly warmed thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, the amount of water available in the world’s rivers, lakes, and reservoirs has shrunk. To compensate, nations the world over have plundered the water stored underground to irrigate crops and hydrate parched citizens. But many of these hidden water reserves are being sucked dry by humans quicker than they are being replenished through rainfall and snowmelt, or through artificial groundwater recharge. The cascading consequences are immense.
“Water is at the front line of the climate crisis, that’s for sure,” said Sherri Goodman, an expert on national security and climate change who in 2024 published the book Threat Multiplier: Climate Change, the Military and Fight for Global Security, about the challenges for maintaining peace and stability on a warming planet.
Shrinking groundwater tables will only worsen these challenges — and the threats extend far beyond agricultural productivity.
Governments presiding over shrinking groundwater resources will find it harder to climate-proof their nations against longer, harsher droughts and other extreme weather patterns. Then there’s the growing threat of biodiversity loss, which is already happening at an accelerating rate, within groundwater-dependent ecosystems.
The likelihood of the mass movement of people away from water-scarce regions, and with it, the likelihood of more acrimonious fights over clean, readily available groundwater — which are already playing out — will also grow over time. The proliferation of thirsty data centers, especially in the parched U.S. Southwest, is just the latest salvo in these water wars.
As Goodman told Truthout (repeating a much-used maxim), “Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting.”
Study Key Findings
Using more than two decades worth of NASA satellite data, the researchers in the recent major groundwater study in Science Advances found that as areas of increasing drying around the globe have grown and expanded, they’ve merged to form four huge continental mega-drying regions, all in the Northern Hemisphere.
These four regions cover large swaths of northern Canada and northern Russia; a long contiguous stretch spanning southwestern North America and Central America; and the huge, multi-continental region that links North Africa to Europe, the Middle East to Central Asia, northern China and South and Southeast Asia.
The speed with which the planet’s freshwater resources are disappearing is staggering.
The speed with which the planet’s freshwater resources are disappearing is staggering. The researchers found that an area twice the size of California is drying annually. But these aren’t the only disturbing findings woven through the study.
“We find that, while most of the world’s dry areas continue to get drier and its wet areas continue to get wetter, dry areas are drying at a faster rate than wet areas are wetting,” the researchers found. Furthermore, “the area experiencing drying has increased, while the area experiencing wetting has decreased.”
Nor are the implications confined to just freshwater. The planet’s continental regions now add more freshwater to sea levels than individual ice sheets, while drying regions are more responsible for rising sea levels than glaciers and ice caps on land. In other words, this freshwater (which includes mined groundwater) flows out to the ocean along rivers and streams, or is lost through evaporation and drought.
“Without urgent attention and action, the findings presented here may well continue to worsen, leading to accelerations in water insecurity and sea level rise,” the researchers warned.
“It’s unfortunately not super surprising what the findings are, but it’s certainly alarming,” said Ann Hayden, the Environmental Defense Fund’s (EDF) vice president of climate resilient water systems, about this study. The EDF is a non-profit that seeks scientific, legal, and economic solutions to global problems.
“We’ve known at EDF for quite some time that groundwater depletion globally has been reaching crisis point,” Hayden told Truthout. And yet, she says, it’s a problem that doesn’t get nearly enough serious attention. “We’re past time to be taking action in shoring up and managing our groundwater supplies sustainably.”
While groundwater depletion remains a worryingly overlooked problem, its implications continue to play out in real-time. Just take Iran, which is in the throes of a major water crisis.
In recent decades, amid a climate of political isolationism, Iran scaled up its agricultural footprint to keep its people fed. But the groundwater reserves needed to irrigate these crops are drying up. Over half these aquifers are deemed critically depleted. Vital lakes and dams have also dried up. Amid recent record high temperatures, drinking water rationing was widespread this summer. Human rights activists have linked regional water scarcity with worsening civil unrest.
In India, the ripple effects from the country’s own groundwater problems seem to spread endlessly outwards.
As farmers drill deeper and deeper wells to find water, for example, the village councils that operate community drinking water wells must do the same, explains Srinivasan. That takes a lot of expensive electricity.
“In some of our work we’ve found these villages are going into electricity debt just in order to be able to chase the water tables,” said Srinivasan. “It’s a huge burden on taxpayers. Huge burden on farmers. Huge burden on the villages. And a huge burden on the planet.”
DOGE and Solutions
Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to righting the ship is the lack of a broad, overarching system of governance regulating groundwater use. “Jurisdictionally, water tends to be managed at very local levels,” said Goodman. “And the whole culture around water just varies around the world.”
One of the biggest obstacles to righting the ship is the lack of a broad, overarching system of governance regulating groundwater use.
Have there been any concerted efforts to put together some kind of global groundwater governance structure or sustainability strategy?
“I wish I could say that we’ve come across that. We have not,” said EDF’s Hayden. “That’s exactly the type of energy we’re trying to build by shining more of a light on this issue.”
In the meantime, damaging political winds are blowing strong. In the U.S., the federal cost cutting measures led by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have sliced into the country’s international efforts at fostering better groundwater management harmony.
Until very recently, Goodman was a senior fellow with the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a non-partisan organization charged with helping policymakers and stakeholders understand global developments. But DOGE cut the Wilson Center’s staff “from 500 to 5,” said Goodman.
“The last administration did champion global water security,” said Goodman. Because of the DOGE cuts, however, “some of that experience has dissipated,” she added.
But even within a fractured regulatory landscape roiled by political partisanship, there are signs of promise.
The recent groundwater study found the over-pumping of groundwater in California’s Central Valley — a phenomenon primarily driven by the region’s huge agricultural footprint — continues to happen at increasing amounts “rather than at sustainable or decreasing rates.” But Hayden hopes all that might be about to change.
Over 10 years ago, California passed a landmark groundwater governance law called the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). It’s a highly unique regulatory scheme and countries like India are watching it closely. With a built-in end-goal of achieving groundwater sustainability by 2040, however, SGMA’s roll-out is intentionally slow. But Hayden believes the early signs are positive.
“It’s a big shift that’s going to take some time to go in the right direction,” said Hayden about SGMA’s implementation. “But we think that’s actually [already] happening — the necessary enabling conditions are coming together to steer the ship in the right direction.”
“If we continue on the path we are on, we should all be very worried.”
In India, Srinivasan points to her country’s own promising efforts to better manage this precious resource, including an aggressive approach to groundwater recharge. She also highlighted a new program to equip farmers with solar pumps, and an incentive program to buy back some of the electricity generated.
The idea, she says, is that instead of pumping so much water, farmers will choose to sell the electricity back, in the process becoming more efficient water users.
“I’m concerned and hopeful at the same time,” said Srinivasan, when asked how she views the future. “If we continue on the path we are on, we should all be very worried.” But, she added, “even in a lot of dry parts of India, you are going to see more rain. It’s unseasonal. It may not last that long and so forth. But we are managing those changes better. And in the long run, I think we can do a lot better.”
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