Towards Sustainable Groundwater Management in Kuwait: Strategic Directions
摘要
United Nations sustainable developmental goals on water, referred to as UNSDG 6 have been a baseline for developmental activities in many countries. SDG 6 has 6 targetsTargets and indicators along with international collaborationCollaboration, capacity building, knowledge, and local communityCommunity participation. Kuwait has aligned its 2035 vision to achieve the UNSDG targetsTargets and indicators. This chapter summarizes the activities focusing on the targetsTargets to achieve clean water and sanitation. Achieving water sustainability in arid and hyperarid regions like Kuwait is a strenuous task depending mainly on the desalinated water, brackish groundwater, and treated wastewater for drinking, domesticDomestic, industrial, and agricultural purposes. Kuwait depends on two main transboundary aquifersAquifer shared by the neighboring countries for groundwater needs. Groundwater chemistry has been monitored for natural and anthropogenicAnthropogenic impacts on the quality and sustainability of the resources. The hotspots of hypersaline groundwater, paleo groundwater, contamination zones, and rechargeRecharge regions have been identified and regularly examined. Further, utilisation of treated wastewater and desalinated water has led to an increase in water use efficiencyEfficiency. In addition, variationVariation in rainfall patterns, sourceSource moistureMoisture for rechargeRecharge, and rainwater chemistry for recharging the water resourcesWater resources has been determined to address future challenges. Attempts to increase the groundwater potentialPotential of the region through managed aquiferAquifer rechargeRecharge experimentsExperiments have proved to be successful in the region. The chapter also highlights the challenges in addressing the targetsTargets, especially to meet the demands of the increasing populationPopulation, rapid urban development, and industrialisation with available water resourcesWater resources. Suggestions for water conservation techniquesTechnique, policy development, and monitoring techniquesTechnique have been suggested to address the challenges. Incorporating these studies, a cloud based online monitoring systemSystem integrating the field real-time data through IoT and interlinking with the end users for the development of strategies to manage the water resourcesWater resources has been proposed in this chapter.