[00:00:00] Bridget Scanlon: Welcome to the Water Resources Podcast. I am Bridget Scanlon. In this podcast, we discuss water challenges with leading experts, including topics on extreme climate events, over exploitation, and potential solutions towards more sustainable management. Today I would like to welcome Francois Bertone and Lucy Lytton, who are senior groundwater specialists in the World Bank, to the Water Resources Podcast.
Thank you both for joining me today to talk about groundwater issues in the World Bank. And you recently released a report titled “The Hidden Wealth of Nations, The Economics of Groundwater in Times of Climate Change”. And I was very impressed with this report and I hope today we will be able to discuss various aspects from the report and other issues that the World Bank is dealing with in terms of groundwater.
So the title of the report, The Hidden Wealth of Nations”, sort of follows on from what the UN talked about last year, “groundwater making the invisible visible”. And so I think that's it's a challenge many people don't understand groundwater and, and it's connected to so many aspects of what you're dealing with at the bank, poverty alleviation, food production and irrigation and drought resilience and health impacts.
And so today we will cover, try to cover many of these aspects and then talk about how to govern the governance issues in terms of groundwater. So maybe we'll start with Francois maybe you can describe a little bit about what were the drivers in developing this report by the World Bank.
[00:01:43] Francois Bertone: Thank you very much, Bridget.
Well, drivers, it's always, always difficult to know what are the, the main driver. Yeah. the World Bank is working on ending poverty. And we are tackling many aspects of the poverty side and on the water sector, groundwater is one of these aspects that we are not yet focusing much for.
And I will let Lucy continue on that because she worked on groundwater quality. And she published, last year, a very interesting report on global groundwater quality and how to tackle these issues. And probably we can understand that economics of groundwater, which is, the main topic of this report comes just after that, because it's, it's definitely the next stage of the groundwater to be at the highest level in the, in the, to the decision makers. But maybe Lucy will add more on that.
[00:02:50] Lucy Lytton: So what my observation of working in the bank is that the presence of groundwater in project areas is often seen as the kind of the silver bullet, the one thing that will save a population from ruin.
And the problem with that image is that the complexities of groundwater management are not well understood. And it's. the unique storage characteristics that give it the capacity to buffer, and only if that buffer is not overexploited in the long term. And so to manage that, it's the storage characteristics we need to understand.
And, and so, so came that kind of characterization of the groundwater, as presented in the report. Yeah, so that was one of the drivers
[00:03:32] Bridget: Right. And so there was a very nice infographic provided with the report that discusses the highlights of the report. Maybe one of you could describe those a little bit its role in reducing poverty, protecting food security and enhancing resilient growth. And Francois, you mentioned that one of the key goals of the bank is to eradicate extreme poverty and also enhance growth and development. So maybe you guys, one of you could describe the highlights of the report.
[00:04:05] Francois: Yeah. This is the interesting things. We, we all, know this, we all know how important groundwater is in general, and especially groundwater, especially we know that in the helps for food security, to reduce poverty for resilient growth. What is interesting with this report is now for the first time we bring to you, for instance, we, we managed the economies that the World Bank, they managed to identify that. If you have access to groundwater, individual farmers have access to groundwater, then this access help them to mitigate half of the losses in agricultural yield caused by drought. Meaning that now we have figured you don't have access, you face a hundred percent of food security issues from the drought, if you have access to groundwater, you manage to mitigate half of the impact on the agricultural yield and globally on the economies. You have access to groundwater, you manage to, you have a buffer on economic growth that covers about one third of the drought, meaning that nowadays, we cannot say, yeah, groundwater helps to reduce poverty.
It's more than that. When you have access to groundwater, you gain a third of economic development compared to when you don't have access in case of drought. And it goes even in details like in, with stunting, for instance, we know that stunting of children under five usually affect or globally affects something like 23% of the population. And you move to, you move this percentage to less than 8% if only people have access, direct access to the groundwater resource. This is what the infographics want to, want to show, really comes with exact figures that were obtained at the global scale. Obviously, there are differences by regions and there are all these details.
But what is important is nowadays when we come to talk to the decision makers, when we come to talk at the political level, we can come with figures. It's not about, yeah, groundwater is very important, it helps. No, it's groundwater helps to save one third of the economic losses in case of drought.
This is a very important figure. Now, shall help the decision maker to take the political action that will maintain the groundwater. Because what is also in the report is that as soon as... you are facing groundwater depletion at some place, all this economic gain, you lose it, it disappears. And this is also very interesting rate. Result of the report, you, you lose your economic gain or you prefer capacity or your resilience capacity that is gained with the groundwater. You lose it as soon as you are in an area where we, we understand, we, we recall groundwater depletion.
[00:07:39] Bridget: Lucy, would you like to add anything to this?
[00:07:42] Lucy: I think Francois explained it very well, that nice diagram.
[00:07:47] Bridget: Right, right. And so I think it's great to have the numbers and the infographic you indicate that 49% of domestic water usage relies on groundwater. 43% of water used for irrigation is based on groundwater. And so, as you mentioned, Francois, it avoids 50% loss of yields that you would encounter from drought if you didn't have access, to groundwater.
And then the linkage to health impacts, with stunting in children, reducing that from 23 to 8%. So access to shallow groundwater is extremely important in global growth.
So maybe it's my background. I traditionally think of the World Bank as funding large scale projects, irrigation and dams and, and things like that. So switching then to an emphasis on groundwater is a big change for the World Bank. I know you're still funding work related to dams to make sure that they continue functioning, but not expanding dam development. Maybe if one of you could describe that a little bit and how that has changed over time.
[00:08:59] Lucy: if I could just start here. The bank has in fact financed groundwater projects for decades. However, the groundwater has often been a component of a project and the activities haven't been separately tagged and therefore they've had less visibility than the projects involve constructing large and obvious infrastructure.
Because groundwater is not only a hidden resource, but its infrastructure is also hidden and its use in projects across many different sectors is often unseen. It's hard to put a large plaque on a borehole and a ribbon cutting ceremony seems a bit out of place with buried infrastructure. But there are, I mean, there are, I think the groundwater management improvement project in India, the Atal Bhujal Yojana project, that's now, I think that's, has a value of 420 million and that is done.
I think the first groundwater only project that the bank has undertaken. The green revolution in Asia relied on groundwater as it provided a low-cost source of water to the poorest tenant farmers that enabled them to grow marketable crops and groundwater use across South Asia in large alluvial basins and in local aquifers has shown its value in supporting the most disadvantaged communities.
So I think all of this, and there was a huge, it was a big technical analysis that backed up that with the groundwater project in India. And I think it's an important element of bringing projects like that to funding sources because of the complexity of groundwater really requires a lot of technical work that is perhaps unfamiliar to traditional funders.
And so, and that's one of the great values of this report, the Hidden Wealth of Nations, I think, is that it catches some of the technical language in terms that are more readily understandable for people who are going to be responsible for signing the checks.
[00:11:07] Bridget: Well, I mean, the bank includes a lot of economists, so you have to first get it through that filter. So I think that helps you write something that should be more understandable to the general public and other funding sources too. So that's actually a plus, even if it's a challenge internally. It helps you in the long term and make things more understandable. And one of the aspects of the report that I really appreciated was the description of aquifer typologies and helping us understand how these aquifers work.
You explain it in very simple terms and the graphics that go with it, a bathtub for large and deep aquifers like the Nubian sandstone and then egg cartons for the small aquifers and the basement rocks and how we need to understand how these aquifers work if we're going to manage them appropriately to deal with climate extremes, climate change and food production.
Maybe one of you could describe the aquifer typologies and how that concept evolved and how you came up with these four types because many others in the past have slightly different types of aquifers and YMAP and other groups have developed global aquifer maps. Which one of you would like to take that one on?
[00:12:23] Lucy: Can you see you start and I can... I'll start, I think Francois will embellish or elaborate. So yeah, we classified the aquifers into four different types. Major alluvial aquifers, such as the IndoGangetic Plains, which are like bathtubs in that they have large storage and are slow to deplete. Shallow aquifers, such as most of peninsular India and much of the African continent, which are like...as you said, like egg cartons in that they have limited storage and deplete and recharge quickly. And incidentally, that bathtub egg carton, I think we, we credited who the original idea, I can't remember who it comes from originally, but it was presented by another author earlier. And karstic aquifers, which are most similar to complex pipe networks and complex aquifers that tend to be deeper and or interlayered.
And our attention, as I kind of mentioned earlier, was to provide our readers with mental images of key aquifer attributes that would help them understand why decisions on groundwater management need to be adapted to the aquifer type. So it's not just, Oh, here's groundwater. This is how you manage it. You have to adapt it. And the challenge of developing this classification was the availability of global datasets. And perhaps Francois can kind of elaborate more on this aspect.
[00:13:46] Francois: Yeah. Typology, if we want to have a global analysis, and this was the request from the global analysis, what can we say globally on the aquifers. And you mentioned, Bridget, you mentioned WHYMAP, which is the basics for the thing. But when we look at the typology in WHYMAP, very interesting typology, but it is oriented to the groundwater resource management, to us, for groundwater specialists.
Here, the question that was asked by the economists was about accessibility. Is it accessible to individuals? Is it accessible to the poorest? Shall we rely on the institution to get the groundwater resources? Is it available everywhere or only locally? So the case of gas prices, deep or not deep, accessible to, do you need to be a middle income country to access the groundwater?
This is why we have to adjust this. We cannot only work with WHYMAP. We have to adjust the typology to be able to answer the economic questions and the global data set. So why not? It's global. But then how to make it? And we find a way we work with the GDE Groundwater Dependent Ecosystem database, it's not perfect, it's GDE number one.
We are discussing with GDE about updating this GDE because it's important that we have it updated. We bring some local corrections to this original glimpse based on other, other data sets. The big missing thing is about these major aquifers. We know that these two, we know the way it works.
It's very different from any other, and you have this need for collective management of this groundwater resource that you cannot tell the people stop pumping somewhere because this person will never see the change in his water level until the other users globally consider the thing. It's very important that we have this alluvial, major alluvial, deposit or, major alluvial aquifers well identified.
It's still not perfect in our data set. It's still something that probably we need to bring the limits of the major alluvial aquifers from the specialist that can contribute to, to update it. But as Lucy was mentioning, the main question is, what is our global data set? What can we say today? And the answer cannot be, oh, we don't have anything good or it's, it's still very preliminary.
The answer cannot be that. It's not perfect. It's far from being perfect. And on the scientific side is, well, okay, it's questionable, but it can be improved. It will be improved and we hope that after, after us, some others will come and we'll, we'll improve. What is interesting is not the data set itself is a typology.
The typology is really a first step to help the economists to tell us something about the accessibility of groundwater and how groundwater impacts economic growth. So this is very positive, the report, less positive is the quality of the data set, okay, well, right.
[00:17:39] Bridget: Yeah, well, I think the conceptual understanding of how these aquifers work is very important for, for managing them appropriately.
And I really appreciated how the report covered the range and you emphasize quite a bit in the report the underutilization of groundwater in much of Sub Saharan Africa and that much of this region is shallow aquifers over basement regulates type aquifers and that are readily accessible and that are sort of self-regulating because there's not that much to deplete and, and they recharge, so they're more dynamic. And so people can manage them. And so maybe you don't need institutional control then to govern these types of aquifers. Maybe communities can learn to manage and work within what they can provide. But then on the other hand, then you have these large like bathtub type aquifers like the Nubian Sandstone or the Indo Gangetic Plain that really need to be managed because they're huge aquifers, are a huge resource and you need the whole community to come on board and to have an overarching governance approach. Maybe you can describe a little bit about the challenges. So, and then we've been seeing depletion in some of those large aquifers in North Africa, in India and other regions, and other people like Jude Cobbing has said, we really need to increase use of groundwater in sub Saharan Africa to help with poverty and food production and things like that.
Maybe you can describe a little bit about how those discussions evolved during the preparation of the report.
[00:19:18] Francois: Sure, just one point there, Nubian Sandstorm is part of the complex aquifers, but just again, let's come back to the typology. Typology is major, and it can be accessed by individuals, and Nubian Sandstone is only an institution that is able to drill as deep as necessary for, for this thing, so It's really the difference is there is in terms of, it's not the size of the basin, but it's, it's in terms of accessibility to individuals and especially to individual farmers. And then we can come because it's directly linked to the Sub Saharan Africa and 62% of Sub Saharan Africa is covered by basement aquifers. So what we call shallow aquifer, because of, as you said, Bridget, because it's. local. You can deplete, you can deplete the aquifer, but you cannot have long term depletion. Every flood event, every rain event will fill the aquifer back and probably up to the very maximum. So every year you have to, you, you can again come back. And as you say, in terms of management, it can be local. This is the interest of the shallow local aquifer. The management can be local. And obviously you can overexploit because you might have a groundwater dependent ecosystem downstream of this shallow system. Nevertheless, if you overexploit, you can come back to the original situation.
I thought, well, unless you can also lose your groundwater dependent ecosystem, but in terms of water level, you can come back to the original level. So it's about how do you manage this resource? to fill the gap between the two rainfall events, or the next time it will be used.
And then we come back to the resilience aspect of this groundwater resource. It helps you to cope with drought and it helps you to maintain your agricultural yield. Meaning that if we want to tackle the food security in Sub Saharan Africa, there is no option. We have to develop our shallow local. aquifer in sub-Saharan Africa, covering 62% of this resource.
So, so it's, it's just a matter of, there is a groundwater resource. We know that technically it's not easy. It's low yield. It's very, very shallow, or, or very limited thickness of saturated aquifer and so on. We know that there are many technical issues, but on the other side, the groundwater resource is there. No other option, if we want to create policy, right? So, this is, this should bring us to, now that we made the demonstration to economics, to economic specialists, and to politicians, and to decision makers. Now, next step, what do we do with that? How do we use the resource or organize our ourself to use this resource?
And I will let Lucy continue on the over exploitation because there is definitely this difficulty there and the report, I like the three aspect that under use, And typically the case for the shallow local aquifer in sub Saharan Africa, moderate use. And we didn't discuss about it, but it will come when we talk about quality, because moderate use does not mean conservation or fair conservation.
And when we look at most of the aquifers in Latin America, we don't have over exploitation, but we might have quality degradation, very importantly. And the third part is overuse, and maybe, Lucy, she will tell you about, and specifically, these, examples in IndoGangetic Basin, but we are the same in Northern Africa.
[00:23:35] Lucy: Yeah. So just basically, well, the IndoGangetic Plain, so obviously there's documented overuse of enlarged regions of the IndoGangetic Plain, but also in Peninsular India, where there are these local shallow aquifers, there has been hardship due to overuse of those aquifers. And that's where I think community sort of management of groundwater has shown to deliver the most results really. Because you can, by communities getting together and actually planning their crops, so there's a lot of activity in this area of community management, both in Bank funded project, the Atal Bhujal Yojana project I mentioned before, and also in other NGOs that are working quite a lot in Peninsular India on this community management of groundwater by basically enabling communities to understand what their resources, what their water level is doing at the beginning of the end of the recharge season, at the beginning of the cropping season and to plan accordingly what they will plant based on what water is available. And India of course has this very strong culture of community participation and community management.
So it's a great place to demonstrate where these kinds of techniques will work.
[00:24:59] Bridget: And in the Indo Gangetic Plain, then you've had overexploitation of groundwater, and I guess that impacts access to groundwater because with the water levels dropping a lot, then the poorer people cannot drill wells that are deep enough to access the groundwater. And also there are water quality issues associated with that. I think that you've been working on, Lucy, geogenic contamination and other types of contamination. Maybe you can describe that a little bit.
[00:25:29] Lucy: Yeah, so the geogenic contamination, as , is naturally present in some of the rocks and sediments which form aquifers.
The most well-known of these is arsenic that came to light in Bangladesh in the 80s when a major switch from surface water to ground water as a source of drinking water saved millions from an early death from waterborne diseases only to condemn them to the toxic effect of prolonged exposure to arsenic, which is naturally present in the groundwater.
And arsenic is now known to be present in aquifers on every continent. Fluoride is another common geogenic contaminant of global extent and known to affect groundwater in many Asian and African countries. Manganese is commonly found in groundwaters around the world and is increasingly recognized for its harmful effects. And uranium is another contaminant with known toxicity, and I'm not talking about radioactive uranium, I'm just talking about your ordinary bog standard uranium. It's more common than previously imagined. And I think what we're finding now is that some of the way that we interact with our groundwater systems actually exacerbates some of these water quality issues. For instance, the application of nitrate fertilizers are thought to change the sort of redox conditions of the aquifer, which then enables some other contaminants to mobilize more readily groundwater quality studies are expensive to conduct. I mean, they require sort of a really lot of very detailed work and these issues are often can be quite local because it depends very much how variable an alluvial aquifer is, so it's very interfingered with sediments, with different amounts of clay and different amounts of source material and that the history of the IndoGangetic, the sedimentary history of the IndoGangetic plains is fascinating. It actually reflects the different changes of the different contributions of different parts of the mountain range according to where the water levels were, where the mountain levels were. So it's actually kind of a massive reflection of both climate and orogenic actions in the earth over the last millennia. But not with sand.
And salinity is sort of also a common geogenic contaminant, especially for older groundwaters. But there are many other causes of salinity, particularly that arise from how we use land and water.
And really, I mean, in terms of the impact of water quality on increasing water scarcity is actually the human impact that is of most concern, particularly if groundwater becomes contaminated because of the extreme difficulty of cleaning up an aquifer within a meaningful time frame, and therefore the long duration for which the groundwater is not safe to consume.
And also in the countries where we're most active, laboratory capacity is often not up to the task of measuring the substances that are known to be toxic at very low concentrations, such as PFAS and many others. And that adds an enormous cost burden to any investigative work or cleanup project, which basically puts it pretty much into the prohibitive category.
So the ghastly reality then is that groundwater is being consumed without our full knowledge of the quality impact. And I mean, that kind of happened in Bangladesh in the eighties with the arsenic and our kind of fear that that scenario could play out many times with other things that are much more challenging to measure.
And the critical issue for water quality is it's a local issue. We need to measure it and then to manage land and water in a way that minimizes the harm of natural contaminants and avoids adding new ones, such as from fertilizer, industrial products and domestic effluent.
[00:29:35] Bridget: Right. As if we didn't have enough to deal with water quantity scarcity, we also have to really consider water quality issues.
And I like how you described it. I mean, I know some of the early work on arsenic was done by the British Geological Survey. It said arsenic is generally ubiquitous in the sediments, but then whether it's mobilized or not depends on how we use these aquifers. And I think people have been doing a lot of research to figure out we use the shallow aquifer irrigation, maybe limit deep aquifers in Bangladesh for municipal use, and then try to avoid drawing down the good quality water into the deeper and maintain good quality water in the deeper aquifers without drawing down the contamination.
So there are lots of approaches then to try to manage water quality. And we had Paul Bauman talking a while back on African issues and fluoride and skeletal fluorosis and trying to avoid the volcanics. And every time he does work on wells and stuff like that, he takes water quality samples, analyzes them, and tries to expand the database on groundwater quality.
So the World Bank funds a lot of different projects, and I'm not sure if I saw this correctly. I saw something like funds about 100 billion in active projects in 2021. And who exactly, I think Francois, you tried to explain to me earlier that the client, your client is the countries and you're working with the ministries of finance in different countries and how much of this funding is going towards groundwater and Lucy, you mentioned earlier that groundwater can be a component of many different projects.
So maybe you, one of you could describe that a little bit. Yeah,
[00:31:26] Francois: thank you Bridget for bringing this point because it's very important for the people to understand what's the World Bank. And we all imagine the World Bank with plenty of money coming to, that can help our project in this university or this NGO or whatever.
The World Bank, we are lending money to the countries. That's all. So the money that is used for supporting projects, the money of the country is not the World Bank money. It's never the World Bank money. And it's always a country, a Ministry of Finance in association with his ministry of water resource and the environment, whatever the minister in charge of the groundwater topic that is spending this money in this direction of the problem.
So it should be very clear. I had yesterday another meeting with people looking for money to support groundwater research. The World Bank is not, it's not our duty. It's not our role. Our role is to lend money to the ministerial finance to support at the budget level or at the project level to support groundwater activity for the groundwater.
What are we spending on the groundwater topics? This is we up to now. We are, we are blind. We, we don't know exactly. We don't have a groundwater tag. It's very recent that we have climate tag. We know exactly, we have gender tag. We know exactly. what part of the project considering this, the gender topic appropriately.
We, there are a series of corporate commitments, and we are tagging these commitments. On the ground level, it's not a corporate commitment and we don't have specific tag to understand, for instance, when we have a land conservation project somewhere that maintain the recharge to the aquifers or that enhance the recharge to aquifers, it could be partly a groundwater project.
It's not tagged as such. So today I'm not able to answer, nobody is able to answer to you about how much money the World Bank is dedicating to the groundwater. But this is the aim of the report. The aim of the report is to say, well, whatever project, should it be an agricultural project, energy project, it should better look at the groundwater impact and groundwater implication. And this is part of the main result. When we know how important maintaining the groundwater level can be on drought resilience, on poverty reduction, then you will, you need to think all your project this way. Let's take for instance an energy project, climate, climate free, more, more than climate free, climate oriented. We replace the diesel pump with solar pump. Wow, that's great. Excellent idea. Except that we know that the marginal cost, the marginal cost is the cost of the last drop of water that we pump. The marginal cost of the last drop is zero because of the solar energy is free when it's installed, when it's running, the next drop is free. So then by changing from diesel pump to solar pump, we might increase the overexploitation of the agriculture because it's water. So we need to change the way we are considering your project and the way we are designing the World Bank project, to be sure that they are not necessarily pure groundwater projects, but groundwater preservation oriented, we shall be sure that if we are working on agricultural projects, the agricultural input that we are putting, this entrance that we are adding, this product can be there to, will not contaminate the groundwater.
So then same thing for any other agricultural project there, today there are subsidies to drilling. It's not direct subsidies to drilling, it's subsidies. And this is without regarding, without taking into consideration the place we are. Developing the scrub, all the water source we are using, probably in our project in the World Bank and not the World Bank only, every funders and even the national project, we need to be sure that we have this groundwater consideration and we don't promote the drilling or the extra drilling, extra supply in area that are already over exploited.
So right. Yeah. It's not easy.
[00:36:42] Bridget: Right, right. So I would like to highlight a couple of the projects that I came across in the Horn of Africa Groundwater for Resilience project, which is 385 million project that extends across Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. I think that is designed to help with the drought alleviation and they had huge drought in this region over the past couple of years.
And then I also saw a reference to a project in West Bengal, 150 million to help about one, almost one billion people with micro-irrigation. So I think maybe more and more we will see projects geared towards groundwater than in the future. Do you think that will be the trend?
[00:37:26] Francois: Is it a need? The main question is, do we need to cure groundwater projects?
For instance, Groundwater for Resilience in the Horn of Africa is more about how to use the groundwater resource to deal with drought and with food security in the borderlands, in this area where the state itself cannot go, can hardly go, which is very far, with a high level of insecurity. So is it a pure groundwater project?
No, not at all, no, it's about using the groundwater resource for drinking water supply for constructing pipe at 385 million. It's not $385 million of drilling. Obviously most of this money is used to design and to construct pipe networks for these people to get the money. So it's called Groundwater for Resilience because the basics is there, the results in this borderland between Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, but it's also, it'll include soon South Sudan in this area, we know that the only resource is groundwater. So how to use it better, how to maintain it as Lucy was saying, how not to contaminate it, how to manage the quality of the resource and the quantity and have access. Are we going to see more groundwater? I don't think it's desirable. I don't think we need to have a pure groundwater project.
We need to have a strong groundwater component or groundwater understanding in our project. In the energy project we want the energy project when the energy minister of whatever country Cambodia will discuss with the World Bank, they will say, Oh, we want to move from diesel to solar, but preserving with our groundwater result. Because we know that because of the groundwater depletion, the subsidence in the Mekong Delta is increasing. It's occurring naturally, but in addition, it increased and we have a loss of 1.7 point of GDP every year because of these subsidence. So we want to maintain that and we want our energy project to preserve the groundwater.
That's, that's the only objective of this, of this report. Just to say groundwater is everywhere. Much more than what we think.
[00:40:07] Bridget: I think another aspect of the report and of the other websites related to the World Bank is that the role of groundwater and farmer led irrigation development. I mean, sub Saharan Africa you have and South Asia, India, much of India, smallholder farmers with less than 10 hectares are the dominant number of farmers dealing with food production and food security.
And so maybe you can describe a little bit about how groundwater helps with this. You've already mentioned Francois switching from diesel to solar and I know some of your colleagues in Tanzania expanding solar energy sources to extract groundwater. So this decentralized approach and trying to help smallholder farmers which of course is complicated by land tenure issues also, it's the whole thing, but I mean, helping these small holder farmers I think is huge and anything that you can do then to increase food security, double cropping, dry season cropping, all of those sorts of things would be very beneficial. Maybe one of you could describe that a little bit.
[00:41:12] Francois: I don't want to talk on behalf of my irrigation colleagues who are pushing for farmer led irrigation development. We know that. There is an analysis these days at the World Bank and we are really, the World Bank is really promoting the farmer led irrigation development. this is on one side and I don't want to get into that.
When I am asked, when we are asked, what is the water source in all, and especially in all this arid area for farmer led irrigation? The only answer is, is groundwater resource here. We cannot be in sub-Saharan Africa, most of the farmer land. The plot itself. People are dealing with from less to hectare to up to one or two hectares and no more.
So we don't have many options there for, identifying and, producing groundwater resource at the, at this place. So probably, probably we have to, we have to work on the technology side. To access this shallow groundwater resource, we need to improve the way we are doing it. In some countries, in some areas, and Lucie was mentioning it in the part of the Indian Peninsula, there is a development of the shallow, of the shallow groundwater there.
In Sub Saharan Africa, it's not developed, and when we compare the two, we see that the price of the, the price of the wells, the open wells, is triple. We are, we have it for less than 100 per meter in India and it's over Saharan Africa. Probably one of the main issues is that Lucie also mentioned the variation, the over exploitation of this shallow groundwater and the change in the, in the amplitude of the variation of the water level. So meaning that we need to be able to dig deeper. in our open wells. How do we do it?
How to introduce the jackhammer technology? How to introduce dewatering technology? Yeah, farmland irrigation is probably one of the, one of the solutions. Again, I don't want to talk on behalf of my irrigation colleagues. It's one of the solutions for dealing with food or tackling the food security issue and access to shallow groundwater.
Yeah, it's not, it's not that easy. And especially if we want to make it as scale at scale mean. And you mentioned that Bridget, you say 62% of the SSA is shallow basement type? Yeah, shallow, but it, it correspond to 255 million people. So if we want to make it at scale, this food security and things, it's irrigated land in this area.
It's so many millions of wells and it's a lot of work. And we, we need to bring the, we need to help with the technology.
[00:44:42] Bridget: Right. So lastly, maybe we can talk a little bit about groundwater governance issues and the policy levers that you describe in the report and how you can see things evolving in the future. And if you are optimistic about the role of groundwater in poverty alleviation and, and how the bank can manage these issues.
[00:45:05] Francois: Yeah. A few things about levers. Again, if we want to look at levers to groundwater management, we need to separate definitely overexploitation, moderate use and on the overexploitation side, we shall keep that in mind.
We shall keep, it was, it was part of one of your question you had earlier about how does groundwater overexploitation impact the poorest. And yes, it's right. As soon as the water level goes down, it's only the poorest that cannot dig deeper. And the poorest in that case, they have to either sell the land or, and work for the new landowner who can dig the well and above or move to cities.
Migrate. And that brings us to the, to the weak sustainability concept that many, many economists were thinking that, yeah, why not over exploiting the resource at the moment, if only it creates richness, it creates growth that allow to find the next step for, for development. And next step can be, I don't know, in the aeronautical industry or whatever.
Economies, they demonstrate that it does not work for, for water. It might work for petroleum, for gold, for other resources, but not for, For what? Because the overexploitation and the growth development is straight, probably because they are not economists, but probably because it's trade over a series of individual cannot really make the make the gap.
So the conclusion of that is. We cannot overexploit the groundwater resource. We, it's not a solution. We, it helps to tackle the food security and that was the case in India. It really helps to work on food security, but it does not reduce poverty. And on the contrary, overexploitation increases the poverty, increase the, the, the sensibility to the, to drought event.
And especially in time of climate change, we'll see that it will increase. So what are the ideas now on this guy, the case on the over exploitation case, work on the better ground water management, preserve the quality. We know that we need to preserve the quality. And we need to really focus every single policy that help preserving the groundwater resource.
And we are not talking about groundwater law or groundwater policy, we are talking about every single policy. energy agriculture. That's the main one. Now we know that energy subsidies, we don't want the energy subsidies to impact, contribute to groundwater overexploitation. We don't want the agricultural subsidies to contribute to that.
Doesn't mean that we shall not subsidize agriculture. Yes, obviously we can continue to do it, but we need to do it With due consideration to the groundwater resource at this stage, and to look at the balance, overexploitation is not a solution. Yeah,
[00:48:43] Bridget: so I guess we're coming towards the end of the hour, and I would like to maybe summarize how you see things moving forward, and if you're optimistic about increasing role of groundwater and improved understanding that this report provides.
in helping us manage these aquifer systems and reducing poverty and helping with food security, climate smart agriculture, reducing drought, increasing drought resilience and all of those different aspects. So what do you think looking forward? Are you optimistic about the future?
[00:49:19] Francois: Maybe one more word on the next step, and that was highlighted when we launched this economics of groundwater report.
We are the president of the International Association of Hydrogeologists and the former one. The two of them were insisting on the capacity, the national capacity for groundwater management, for highlighting these things. And I think they were perfectly correct. Yes, we shall be optimistic and we shall not forget to prepare the next generation this, these people that will locally be able to talk to the decision makers.
And this is probably the gap that is missing in most of the developing countries, most of the developing countries, people talking about groundwater are still coming from outside, they are not. Inside the country, sitting next to the decision makers. And this is definitely the, the next step we are working on it. And, we need to be optimistic. Yeah.
[00:50:31] Bridget: Well, thank you both for participating in the Water Resources Podcast. Our guests today were Francois Bertone and Lucy Lytton from the World Bank. And I commend you on an excellent report and helping people understand groundwater and its role in poverty alleviation.
Thank you so much.
