 Welcome to the webinar on groundwater, seeing the invisible in its key role for a sustainable world. And, well, you know, it is also my pleasure to have three speakers who will present to you a number of case studies on the importance of groundwater. And I will just give a brief introduction. I myself, I am a groundwater hydrologist from IHE Delft, where I work in indeed research and capacity strengthening and education through the Delft based programs and also the Erasmus Moondis program specifically dedicated to groundwater and global change. So, as you might know, by now, this year has been labeled the name of the year of groundwater by UN Water. And indeed, the slogan is making the invisible visible. And you could ask yourself, but you probably already know that very well. But for many, it is important to keep on talking about why we need to see groundwater and make it visible. We know it is the largest liquid fresh water reservoir. So as such, it is has a major role in achieving the sustainable development goals, especially also in its link to food and energy. So the water security is extremely important, also in those links, and also in the adaptation of and mitigation, sorry, the addition to mitigation of climate and global change, think of increasing water demand with a growing population and growing economy, but also the issues of more intense rainfall events that's followed by longer and drier periods in many parts of the world. And there we can see that groundwater and its reservoir, yeah, have a huge potential. And at the same time, of course, groundwater is also threatened, because it is an invisible resource. And we know in many areas there is strong over exploitation, which you can actually see on this map built by IGRAC, the darker colored areas are those where the abstraction, the groundwater abstraction is very near to or exceeds the amount of annual inflow rainfall and river inflow towards the groundwater bodies. And we can also see that there are large areas where there is a large under exploitation or under use of the potential of groundwater. So in that sense, yes, there are definitely impacts that we need to consider contamination and over exploitation. But there's also this this role of groundwater that we necessarily need to address in the achieving the SDGs and the adaptation mitigation of climate change. So therefore, increasing the understanding of groundwater and groundwater resources will improve the management of this resource. So we need to keep on strengthening awareness, building awareness, strengthening capacity through also education and research. And therefore, at IG Delft, we have we're fortunate to be involved in these activities. And I think the following case studies will give you a nice overview. There are many case studies around the world. These three we try to represent some of the work being done looking at impacts, but particularly at solutions that involve groundwater and that look at the ways forward towards, for instance, upscaling these solutions to increase their potential.