 Welcome to the 59th webinar organized by the Water Channel. This is also the 11th webinar that we are co-organizing with IHE DELT. These webinars are part of a process to extend learning and exchange beyond the classroom, to open it up to the wider global society within which IHE is located. So these webinars are free to attend and open to all. We, the inhabitants of the Earth, refer to our planet as the Blue Planet. This is because when seen from outer space, it looks very blue on account of the oceans, the seas, the rivers and the lakes. However, we tend to forget that there is a whole lot of blue going on below the Earth's surface as well, a whole lot of blue. And I'm referring of course to groundwater. The Earth's groundwater resources are very huge and very important. Groundwater accounts for 50% of all drinking water worldwide, 40% of all irrigation, and 30% of all the water used in industry. Besides, groundwater is important as a key component of nature itself, which sustains rivers and prevents land from caving in. Despite all that, we don't know so much about the groundwater resources. For one, it is not so easy to detect and map groundwater resources in the first place because they are not directly visible. They can exist in the form of large aquifer system spanning wide areas across watersheds and of course across national boundaries. So, this makes it difficult to detect, calculate and understand groundwater resources, which in turn makes it difficult to manage them judiciously. And it is for this reason that a large number of known groundwater sources are declining rapidly. To discuss this very important topic, we are very lucky to have with us Dr. Neno Kukurich, I hope I have pronounced your name properly, Neno, who is the director of ICRAC, which is of course the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Center. He's a hydrogeologist by training with about 30 years experience across 20 countries. And very importantly, he's at the moment heading several international inter-agency efforts to assess and study global groundwater resources, especially transboundary activists. Before handing things over to Dr. Neno, I would like to emphasize that this is an interactive webinar. We request you to please share your questions and comments throughout the session. You can do that through this chat window that you see over here, where I just typed here. We will keep collecting your questions and comments throughout the webinar and discuss them during the Q&A session, which will take place after Neno's presentation. So without further ado, I would like to hand over the proceedings to Dr. Neno. Please take it away. Thank you, Abhakan. Thank you for this introduction. And welcome to everyone to this short seminar dedicated to groundwater making invisible visible. In a short period of time, I would like to take you along to the journey, groundwater journey. And I will talk briefly about monitoring of groundwater, assessing of groundwater, and of course, management of groundwater. Well, these three aspects are common aspects for many issues. And if you stay in the field of water, also lakes, if you talk about lakes or rivers, we have monitoring, assessment, and management. Well, the main difference is that it's much easier to assess lakes and surface water, rivers, than groundwater, because groundwater is invisible. Therefore, I will talk about additional aspect, and that's how to make invisible groundwater more visible. So there was introduction briefly about groundwater. And myself, I work for IGREC, which is International Groundwater Center. And our role is to facilitate and promote international sharing of information and knowledge on groundwater. And we are doing that already for more than 15 years. And being a UN affiliated center, we especially work on transboundary aquifers and groundwater monitoring, and of course, information and knowledge sharing. IGREC is UNESCO Global Groundwater Center. It works closely with WMO and IH, and it is supported by the government of the Netherlands. So that's the reason that we are based in Netherlands. Well, then if I start with a global perspective of groundwater and some staggering figures about use of groundwater worldwide, you will see that half of the population in the world is drinking groundwater every day, and that a lot of groundwater is used for irrigation and industry. Not only that, groundwater sustains ecosystems and it maintains the base flow of rivers, so there will be no rivers or there will be very short without groundwater. And then, of course, groundwater is crucial for preventing seawater intrusion in countries like the Netherlands. It will be very difficult to remain if there were no groundwater and having a balance with south water and preventing intrusion. So despite these impressive figures, still invisible groundwater is out of sight and out of mind of most people. I need to say here as well that there are more figures on groundwater, usually people start saying, well, groundwater makes up 97% of all fresh liquid water resources. But, you know, we can't use really all that water because a part of the water is polluted already and the part is very deep and it's not economically viable to use it. And sometimes, if you extract groundwater for one purpose, you endanger actually groundwater users, other groundwater users. Nevertheless, groundwater is much more important than it appears in daily life. So the world is changing and we see more and more water scarcity and we see that surface water is becoming less available and that we rely more and more on groundwater. However, we still don't know sufficient about groundwater and we need to do more about it. One more data on this slide is about population growth. We don't talk too much about that. We talk about climate change, but much less about population growth and especially in dry areas Africa especially. Well, so if we look how to build a case for invisible groundwater, those goals are defined in what is called Agenda on Sustainable Development of United Nations. And as you probably know, there is Sustainable Development Goals 6, which is about water and sanitation and related to many other goals. So that's a call. And then we have, as I said, we have assessment, which is needed to know what state of groundwater resources we have monitoring, which is important to follow the change of the state. And then, of course, we have management and governance, how to deal with changing world. As groundwater is invisible, we very much need this outer circle and that's building the case for invisible groundwater. Because, you know, of course, we need better assessment and monitoring and more assessment and monitoring, but if something is invisible, then it's very difficult to attract attention of the community to do more on assessment and monitoring. Therefore, awareness, diplomacy, lobbying, synergy, and capacity building are very important. So let me just go through a number of related slides, related to these four aspects. To start with assessment, especially assessment of trans down the reactors, because in each country, more or less, there are organizations, usually geological surveys, which take care of assessment of national resources and then groundwater resources internationally. There are more than 60% of large aquifers which are international. Well, as you know, water is stupid. It doesn't stop at the border. So this is what's shown on this slide, very simplified situation to show away how groundwater can cross the border, but of course, there are much more complex situations. So there are differences among countries, differences in language, classifications, and reference systems, etc. And we need to harmonize all this information and data and also to harmonize policies and the legal documents in order to start collaboration on commonly shared groundwater resources. This process of assessment of internationally shared groundwater or aquifers actually started just 20 years ago with a simple inventory in Europe, whether just saying countries, whether you agree that you share groundwater or not. So red or white. Then gradually, this is snapshot from 2007 in Central Asia. We continued to assessment worldwide. And this is, I think, a very illustrative example of delineation of transboundary aquifers in Africa. And you see in 2002, we started just with the circles and ovals. And in 2000, and then gradually improving. And in 2015, there is a map of transboundary aquifers of the world. And this is a rough delineation of transboundary aquifers, but at least well done with the contribution of hundreds and hundreds of hydrogeologists from all these countries. But this is at least, and now we know more or less where the aquifers are. Well, we also have collected some additional information, actually, basic information on these aquifers. And this is also available. But it is also important that it's available online and in structured and information system on transboundary aquifers. And I will talk a little bit later on importance of information technology for this building a case for invisible groundwater. But this is one of the examples, because for the first time history, we really have online system showing the largest aquifers in the world and basic information about those aquifers. There is also, as a result of the hard work, assessment methodology developed. And you see that it involves actually not only hydrogeology, but also environment, socio-economical aspect, the legal institutional aspect. And it's very much about harmonization, but all this is about cooperation. So cooperation, if people are willing to get together and do something on a common issue, they can achieve it. The last slide about importance of transboundary aquifers for water security is just an example that among the most stressed aquifers in the world, large aquifers, most of them are among the stressed aquifers in the world, most of them are transboundary. So that's additional reason that we have to take care of these precious resources. But that was about assessment of state of groundwater globally. As we live in a changing world, we see that also aquifers groundwater is changing due to various environmental processes. We see change in precipitation pattern, for instance. And also human impact, of course, change of land cover, groundwater obstruction, et cetera, et cetera. So groundwater assessment can't be complete really if we don't have data on monitoring and also you can't make any kind prediction without monitoring. Basically, we can't manage what we don't measure. Well, nowadays we have a lot of models and we have also valuable information from satellite, remote sensing, but all these other approaches need actually terrestrial measurements for verification. If you look, for instance, for these global models, which are predicting climate change, we will see that there are a lot of uncertainties depending what kind of model one uses and what kind of climate prediction and apply scenarios. We will see, for instance, that prediction is, in one case, that groundwater recharge is going to increase in certain parts of the world, or decrease depending on all these conditions. So the other example is very recent and it's about GRACE, which is a satellite program, which gives very rough estimation on what is going on with the groundwater reserves worldwide. But again, it's very rough. It's a sort of not really estimate, rather a guesstimate. And it's useful that without terrestrial monitoring, which is declining, unfortunately, we can't make any better prediction. And that was a reason for us to set up global groundwater monitoring initiative, Global Groundwater Monitoring Network, 10 years ago, and to improve quality and accessibility of groundwater monitoring information. Basically, having people networks and portal. So people networks organizing capacity-building trainings all over the world, awareness as well about monitoring, and making available a common global portal where people can upload data, process monitoring data, and disseminate, share those data. So this is the other next example of technology, which is helping us to make groundwater more visible. Just to mention also as a part of this program, there's a smartphone app application, which can be used, of course, everything is freely available, can be used to register groundwater levels in the field. The other very important development is so-called sensor observation services. That means that we are not talking anymore about data exchange. We are talking about data sharing, and like Canada and America, and now they connected with our global system. It's simply making exchange, sharing of data, formatting data, making possible. So the time of large databases is over. It is about sharing all kinds of information to get a global picture of what's going on, really, what you can see locally. Where I think it's one person. Is everybody able to hear okay? Okay, so these are important technological developments. Let's move to the third aspect, and that's groundwater management and governance. So we need assessment and monitoring for informed groundwater management and governance. The difference between management and governance is that the governance includes all stakeholders, and not only those who formally manage groundwater. Now, I would like to say a few words about new approaches, new tools, and thinking out of books. A lot of possible solutions are coming from the other disciplines. For instance, smart crops are coming from agriculture, and we need to be aware of these actually groundwater related measures. Then if we talk, for instance, new technologies, we see how important serious gaming is in decision making process, and we implemented that in many occasions, and it's really very useful. Then if we talk about new technologies like solar pumping, solar supported actually, solar technology for the pumping of groundwater, we see a lot of advantages of it, and CO2 neutral, and a long-term good investment, and incredible increase. I think that in the last five years, in India, it increased from 5,000 to 170,000. At the same time, there are also some shortcomings, for instance, for the management, it's very difficult to control it, and how much someone is pumping. Then about the multiple value of groundwater, for instance, how we could persuade Heineken's and Coca-Cola's of this world to look at groundwater not only as a part of the production process, but also to get engaged in the whole archive together with other stakeholders to realize that they need to manage resource together. I'm very sorry, we have an alarm in the building, and unfortunately we had to cut this event. We had to leave the room. Okay, that's very unfortunate. We are leaving now, so I'm just going to wrap up with this. Think about it, and I will look at your questions, and I will answer to your questions in writing. I just wanted to wrap up that we need to pay attention to global awareness, and we will have groundwater as a world water day in two years' time, so making visible is the most important is to strengthen cooperation and knowledge sharing, regardless of whether it's about monitoring, assessment, and governance. It is really working together, the most important. Everything is about people and connecting there. I'm sorry that I have to leave. I was looking forward to hear your questions, but again, I'm going to read your questions and answer to your questions. Thank you very much. Bye. Sorry everyone. Looks like the people at IIT had to leave the room on account of a fire emergency. I hope everybody and everything over there is safe. It's really unfortunate. What I can do is I can leave the room open so you can have discussions over the chat box. I don't know what we can do over here. Perhaps the best thing we can do is you can keep posting your questions and I can make a commitment to you that we will bring your questions to Dr. Nino's attention. We will get his answers in writing, as he said, and we will post the questions and his responses on this link that I'm putting up over here. If you keep sending in your questions, we are collecting them, and we will bring them to Dr. Nino's attention, and we will make sure that he responds to them in writing and we will upload the responses on this webpage. Thank you again for turning up, and I'm really, really sorry that we had to cut the event short. I mean, I'm not sure what else we can do about it. Like I mentioned to those of you who missed it, there was a fire emergency at IHE on account of which the speaker and the other colleagues at IHE had to leave the room.