Dr Anthony Turton, the Gibb-SERA Chair in Integrated Water Resource Management and a member of the SERA Water Task Team.

The sustainability of the earth's groundwater reserves - the world's largest accessible store of fresh water, constituting about 94% of all accessible fresh water - is becoming increasingly threatened by over consumption.

This was a clear message from the International Symposium on Groundwater Sustainability, recently held in Alicante, Spain. The outcome is the Alicante Declaration, which calls upon elected and non-elected decision-makers, civil society and experts to put significantly more effort in the sustainable management of groundwater.

According to Dr Anthony Turton - the Gibb-SERA Chair in Integrated Water Resource Management and a member of the SERA Water Task Team, who attended the Symposium and is a signatory to the declaration - groundwater development is an important driver of economic growth in many regions in the world. It is the over consumption of this resource that has a detrimental impact on people, livelihoods and ecosystems. Dried-up wells, rivers and precious wetlands are global phenomena. Over 70% of the world's groundwater consumption is as a result of irrigated agriculture, while 12 mega cities - two billion people - around the world use groundwater as their only source of drinking water.

Symposium organiser, Ramón Llamas from the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, says groundwater is often not well managed as it is accessible with low technology and at little cost. A lack of planning and government controls provides ample opportunity for the millions of groundwater consumers to extract water.

In addition to providing people with drinking water, underground water is critical to many ecosystems, such as floodplain forests, which are severely impacted when groundwater levels decline. Globally, little attention is paid to the linkages between groundwater and ecosystems. The value of these linkages need to be made explicit and incorporated into water resource planning and decision making.

The Alicante Declaration is a global commitment to highlighting the important of groundwater management and governmental planning and decision making in this regard. In addition, the World Conservation Union has proposed to develop a simple toolkit and help-desk network service to support practitioners in addressing the looming groundwater challenge world-wide.

Further presentations on the proposed approach will be made at the 4th World Water Forum in Mexico in March this year. Dr Turton will be participating in this forum, as well as the World Water Week in Stockholm in August, where the Alicante Declaration will again be discussed.