Groundwater, the largest store of accessible freshwater on Earth, is under increasing pressure as a resource and its over-exploitation can harm dependent ecosystems, increase the severity of hydrological drought, and cause land subsidence and salinization.
The proposed boundary is thus potentially misleading, with important implications for assessing the global status of groundwater resources regarding safe and just water management.
Following any new, sustained groundwater pumping, groundwater storage is always initially reduced to a greater or lesser extent. Gradually, again over long timescales for large aquifers, the rate of storage loss slows.
This is the concept of 'capture' whereby the system may approach a new dynamic equilibrium, unless the rate of pumping is such that the maximum rate of capture is exceeded.
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