World Water Day has been celebrated on March 22 every year since 1993. This year’s motto is: “Our groundwater: the invisible treasure”. The aim is to make the importance of groundwater visible.
And that is immense: More than half of the water used by private households worldwide comes from the groundwater, as the World Water Report presented by UNESCO shows. Roughly a quarter of irrigation in agriculture depends on groundwater. Nevertheless, this is “hardly understood and poorly managed in many places,” UNESCO complains.
This also applies to Germany. Because although we are actually well supplied with drinking water in this country due to our location and geological formation, climate change, intensive cultivation and unrestrained sealing of land are causing the groundwater level to drop in some areas, streams and wetlands to dry up. A trend that scientists believe will continue. Water – a few facts about an underestimated resource that is likely to become increasingly scarce and valuable in the future.