Groundwater and urban development

Schirmer, M.; Hartog, N.; Nlend, B.; Fallas, H.; Dassargues, A.; Cetinkaya, I. D.; Jampani, Mahesh; Gogu, R. 2024. Groundwater and urban development [Abstract only]. Paper presented at the World Groundwater Congress (IAH2024) on Interacting Groundwater, Davos, Switzerland, 8-13 September 2024. 1p.

Urban groundwater is an endangered resource as urban land use exerts enormous and very complex pressures on this resource. This session will provide an overview of urban groundwater studies in the context of urban water management, advances in hydrogeological investigation, monitoring and modelling techniques for urban areas, and highlight the challenges. Techniques for measuring pollutant concentrations, water balancing, and pollutant load estimations will be presented. To fully understand and quantify the complex urban water systems, we need to further develop our methods and combine them with new modelling approaches. In addition, it is essential to enter into an in-depth dialogue with people from urban planning, urban drainage and politics as well as the general public to raise awareness of groundwater. Only in this way will we be able to sustainably manage our water resources in and around our urban areas and incorporate them into future urban planning.

For this session we invite especially but not exclusively contributions on the following subtopics:

1. Sustainable management of urban groundwater resource, including water supply from urban groundwater, urban groundwater resource assessment and system analysis, urban groundwater protection, soil and groundwater contamination and remediation, urban water balance, drainage and recharge

2. Groundwater interactions with ecology and the built environment, including dewatering during urban construction, groundwater interactions with urban structures (e.g. subsidence, foundations, infrastructure)

3. Urban groundwater as source and storage for sustainable heating and cooling, including the use of groundwater source heat pump systems, ground source heat pump systems, aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) systems.