Groundwater: making the invisible Visible
In conjunction with World Water Day 2022 celebration, Centre for Environmental Sustainability and Water Security – IPASA cordially invite you to participate in an online forum entitled ‘Groundwater: Making The Invisible Visible’.
The details of the forum are as follow: Title: Groundwater:
Making the Invisible Visible
Date: 22 March 2022 (Tuesday)
Time: 10.00 am – 12.00 pm (MYT)
Panelists:Prof. Ir. Dr. Mohd Fadhil Md Din (Director of Campus Sustainability, UTM & Fellow, IPASA)Datuk Ir. P.Geol. Dr. Azuhan Mohamed (General Manager of Air Kelantan Sdn. Bhd.)P.Geol. Ismail Hj. Tawnie (Director of Hydrogeological Research Centre , NAHRIM)
Moderator: Ts. Dr. Kogila Vani Annammala (Fellow, IPASA)
Pre recorded available at: https://www.facebook.com/utm.ipasa/videos/357459196302317
Let’s learn about groundwater and understand the importance of this water resource towards our country’s water security. See you there!
From the talk, I learned about groundwater, its characteristics, its functions. and sustainable groundwater recharge and extraction which needs to refer to the policy. Besides, there is a need for us to consider an alternative way such as the extraction of groundwater to overcome the water crisis problem since the groundwater can use for storing water during wet periods for use during times of drought. Exploring sustainable groundwater recharge and extraction is the long-run target for us.
Alternative resources must be considered as we have a finite amount of groundwater and our resources have limits.
Groundwater issue become more critical as to the effect of climate change (rainfall pattern). More rainfall in a short span of time will result to lesser natural recharge.
Example that have been done: Adapting SDG into UTM living lab.
From the forum, I have learnt that the water crisis is actually can be tackled because the groundwater has some potential to supply more water. Groundwater has been existing and has been a large resource to the earth population but not all of them are easy to access and therefore, there are not many has been explore. However, groundwater if not care for and manage responsibly, the situation can turn for the worse. Which is why the sustainable approaches has to be applied individually and onto the government and global level because every single person are effecting the groundwater resources implicitly. There are some countries has started however, the management and engineering aspects are important and has to be studied to ensure the construction on excavation, or dams are not giving worst side effects. The awareness of the people seems to be a light matter but actually carrying a heavy responsibilities because people awareness can be a large contribution to sustain groundwater resources.
Groundwater
– The groundwater is invisible but the impact of groundwater is visible. It is one of resources for daily use. From 70% of groundwater, 40% is use for irrigated agriculture and 1/3 of water supply use for industry.
– In India, mostly use groundwater because of their population.
– For the pollution, due to the slow flow of groundwater make the pollution is hard to occur.
– Then, we also need to sustain our water resources to maintain or improve our water quality.
– Moreover, groundwater is more cheaper than surface water.
– For public supply water, Denmark use 100% of groundwater, while Switzerland use 83% of groundwater and UK use 30% of groundwater.
An idea that comes through my mind when hearing the forum is the use of groundwater helps to achive SDG #6. The forum give lots of knowledge about the groundwater includes the groundwater provides half of drinking water worldwide, sustain ecosystem, maintain baseflow of rivers, prevent land subsidence.
Very nice sharing!
I strongly agree with dato which is how can we improve the awarness about the usage of water, firstly we must have the knowledge. The knowledge will make we realised how important the water especially the clean water we needed the most in our life.
Great insight on groundwater pollution and usage of groundwater in other countries. As groundwater development is cheap and it has stable quality, hopefully, Malaysia can start to widely implement groundwater usage as a water source to make use of our abundant groundwater resource. As a start, groundwater can be used for agricultural irrigation in our country.
Very informative forum! Learned a lot from it because before this my knowledge about groundwater is very little. From this forum, the characteristics, efforts made by the gov not only in Malaysia but also in different countries as well to conserve our groundwater resource and also the importance of utilizing it is stressed out very well.