118 Groundwater in Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals
The growing impact of changing climate and land use, and water pollution has underlined the link between groundwater, environment, and society. This Pardee Session reinforces the importance of groundwater in achieving the sustainable development goals.
Monday, 20 October 2025
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
HBGCC, Stars at Night Ballroom B2&B3
Bridging Water Gaps for Sustainability: Deep Network Integration of Groundwater and Surface Water in the Terrestrial Water Geosphere
Paper number: 118-7
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 3:50 PM – 4:15 PM
Authors
Abstract
The flows, storages, and quality of water on land—the terrestrial water both beneath and at the land surface—underpin the survival and stability of societies and ecosystems around the world. Comparing different reports and perspectives on how the groundwater and surface waters interact with each other, and with other societal, climate, and environmental components and aspects of the Earth System, reveals a fragmented and even contradictory understanding. Such gaps and inconsistencies hinder the achievement of many sustainable development goals related to water, and can endanger vulnerable communities and ecosystems where compromised water availability and quality threaten public and ecological health, economic stability, and biodiversity. Effectively addressing the challenges requires a unification of knowledge and of how we understand and handle water interactions and their heterogeneity across the global land area. A network-based approach is proposed to achieve this, by comparatively and consistently identifying and bridging the key knowledge and inconsistency barriers. A deep-network standard model, developed for the terrestrial geosphere as an integrated whole, can be used and tested to dismantle the barriers across disciplinary and sectoral domains, and to transform fragmented knowledge into actionable wisdom for sustainable development.
Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6
doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-413997
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