Abstract:
Water resources, especially groundwater, play a crucial role in economic and social development, and the population is so dependent on water to produce goods and services. Dependence that can derive in a susceptible situation and in two posible scenarios, the reduction of the water supplies (water scarcity) and pollution of the water sources. The availability of groundwater resources (quantity), will depend on two essential parameters, abstraction volumes, and water recharge ratios. This study, evaluate the main stressors for water depletion and pollution, climate change, population growth and land use/land cover change and how they are related and proposes the implementation of two simple models to evaluate groundwater resource. The first considers abstraction, water recharge, runoff, pollution, and marginalization as indicators of groundwater vulnerability, while the second additionally considers the wastewater treatment capacity to evaluate water availability in terms of quantity and quality. For the generation, management and validation of data tools have been used such as remote sensing techniques, geographic information systems, general circulation models, climate change scenarios, analytical hierarchy process, fuzzy logic, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis with Monte Carlos simulations. Results indicate the increase of impervious surface and climate change effects are reducers of water recharge, and the corresponding scenarios indicate dangerous changes that could drive exhaust the aquifer and led to a total scarcity in the next years. While aquifer depletion is a product of the combination of population growth, land use and land cover change, climate change and other factors, give rise to water stress and boosts unstainable resource use. Groundwater is vulnerable and susceptible to overexploitation and pollution, mainly because of the intense agricultural activities and the precarious treatment capacity of the wastewater. Future water management strategies should incorporate an integral plan to preserve the groundwater resource, and water policies should implement regulation that permits reductions in groundwater abstraction, identification of water recharge areas, promoting of induced water recharge, protection of the forest cover and an increase of the water treatment capacity, avoiding water bodies pollution and giving an alternative source of water, making the water 100% recyclable, improving water availability, especially when scenarios predict reduction in the recharge due to climate change affectations, in the near and medium future.
