International cooperation needed for improvment of water quality

There has been a growing realisation over the last 30 years that to preserve water quality and quantity throughout the world, measures at international and national levels are needed to ensure both the protection and sustainable use of our water resources.

It has become increasingly apparent that our groundwater resources – which constitute an essential proportion of fresh water used domestically, by industry and by agriculture – are at risk from a wide variety of stresses including point and diffuse sources of contamination, over-abstraction and seawater intrusion. In fact, the problem is global and regarded as one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report 2007).

Groundwater is vulnerable to contamination from both external and internal sources and cross-aquifer contamination. Groundwater vulnerability is controlled by the nature of pathways from pollution source to the aquifer and the physical, chemical and biological factors that control interactions between contaminants, the rock matrix and groundwater. Establishing groundwater protection strategies to account for the movement of contaminants from the land surface to groundwater is a highly complex undertaking. The complexity of the problem is compounded by the wide variety of contaminants found in groundwaters originating from agriculture (fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides), industry (e.g., heavy metals, organic solvents and other hydrocarbon by-products) and domestic sources; this includes ‘emerging pollutants’, a broad range of endocrine disrupting compounds that have appeared in recent years (e.g., pharmaceuticals and personal care products). To further complicate the problem - groundwater flow rates and thus contaminant mass fluxes and travel times vary widely both spatially and temporally.

Tackling the challenges presented by the need for vulnerability assessment, monitoring and remediation activities requires deep understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes involved and the development of new tools to aid water management. Research is required to increase our understanding of the fundamental processes involved and to develop improved prediction tools that can contribute to the protection and sustainable use of the world’s groundwater resources. In particular, predicting present and future groundwater vulnerability requires modelling capabilities that can simulate the wide range of processes that control the movement and evolution of groundwater and its contaminants. As our knowledge of these processes increases there is an accompanying need to generate new models and further develop existing models for predictive purposes, from pore to aquifer scale. Modelling approaches involve a range of analytical mathematical techniques and complex numerical methods.

However, the industry, by contrast, still relies to a large extent on simple estimates and rules of thumb based often on an individual’s experience. Some of the major challenges remaining today are to conduct research that is more clearly motivated by the needs of the water industry and to package and present recent research results and methodologies in such a way that they can be conveniently absorbed by the water industry and applied in practice.

The ESER (Department of Environmental Sciences and Energy Research based at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel) group directs a series of inter-related research projects aimed at increasing knowledge of the processes that control groundwater vulnerability and developing predictive tools for groundwater contaminant transport and vulnerability, using sophisticated laboratory experiments and advanced modelling methods. These projects seek to exploit the broad range and multidisciplinary expertise of colleagues, visiting researchers and graduate students. Many projects have a primary component of field data, laboratory or modelling based studies but also incorporate one or both of the other components as complementary elements to create well-balanced research projects. ESER focuses on providing broad training in advanced research topics to broaden and deepen existing research experience and to provide specialised training in techniques for investigating groundwater vulnerability.

Prof. Brian Berkowitz, Head of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Energy Research. Research interests in characterization and analysis of flow and transport processes in porous and fractured media, including theoretical modelling based on laboratory and field data, new and quantitatively realistic characterizations of transport behaviour, novel laboratory experiments to investigate flow, chemical transport, and precipitation/dissolution processes in fractured and heterogeneous porous media.
Homepage: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/ESER/People/Brian

Published: Friday, 30th July 2010 by Adelle Kehoe

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