Stockholm World Water Week 2019: BGR supports sustainable groundwater management

As part of the German delegation, the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources (BGR) participated in various activities of the Stockholm World Water Week from 25 to 30 August 2019. The World Water Week is the annual exchange platform for global water issues. This year, the theme of the World Water Week was “Water for society: Including all”, based on this year‘s main topic of the World Water Development Report „Leaving No One Behind“.

In the run-up to the Stockholm event, Prof. Dr. Thomas Himmelsbach, BGR Division Director for groundwater and soil science underlined: “Especially in rural areas, so to speak, on the “last mile”, groundwater often plays an important role in providing the local population with high-quality drinking water.” BGR Project Coordinator of the BMZ-funded global sector project Policy Advice Groundwater, Ramon Brentführer added: “One of our key concerns is to secure better social and economic development opportunities, especially in Africa, through a reliable management of groundwater resources. Too often the importance of groundwater is overlooked, although it can be found in many places and used for local needs.”

BGR workshop at World Water Week in Stockholm Source: BGR

BGR offered a workshop on the topic of Innovations in groundwater monitoring: Potential of telemetry and remote sensing. Collecting groundwater data is often very time-consuming. Therefore, modern telemetric and remote sensing techniques can provide new opportunities to collect and provide important information for the management of groundwater. Experts from UNESCO, from Morocco (Agence Basin Hydrologic de Souss Massa) and Tunisia (OSS - Observatoire du Sahara et du Sahel) discussed with BGR the use and the challenges in the application of these new technologies.

In a second seminar, BGR, together with experts from UNICEF, the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN) from Switzerland, Water Mission and experts from Burundi (IGEBU - Institut Géographique du Burundi), addressed questions for a safe management of drinking water supply for rural populations. In rural sub-Saharan Africa, groundwater plays a key role in achieving SDG 6.1, the international sustainability goal for safe drinking water. The seminar presented examples alongside challenges of managing, drilling for, and extracting groundwater, so that no one in the sub-continent is left behind from using a safe drinking water service.

Members of the BGR team at the World Water Week in Stockholm Source: BGR