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Global peak water limit of future groundwater withdrawals

Nature Sustainability volume 7, pages 413–422 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Over the past 50 years, humans have extracted the Earth’s groundwater stocks at a steep rate, largely to fuel global agro-economic development. Given society’s growing reliance on groundwater, we explore ‘peak water limits’ to investigate whether, when and where humanity might reach peak groundwater extraction. Using an integrated global model of the coupled human–Earth system, we simulate groundwater withdrawals across 235 water basins under 900 future scenarios of global change over the twenty-first century. Here we find that global non-renewable groundwater withdrawals exhibit a distinct peak-and-decline signature, comparable to historical observations of other depletable resources (for example, minerals), in nearly all (98%) scenarios, peaking on average at 625 km3 yr−1 around mid-century, followed by a decline through 2100. The peak and decline occur in about one-third (82) of basins, including 21 that may have already peaked, exposing about half (44%) of the global population to groundwater stress. Most of these basins are in countries with the highest current extraction rates, including the United States, Mexico, Pakistan, India, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. These groundwater-dependent basins will probably face increasing costs of groundwater and food production, suggesting important implications for global agricultural trade and a diminished role for groundwater in meeting global water demands during the twenty-first century.

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Fig. 1: Annual global non-renewable groundwater withdrawal rate (km3 yr−1) through the end of the twenty-first century, visualized as an empirical probability distribution across 900 GCAM simulations.
Fig. 2: Map highlighting, for each basin, the percentage of 900 simulated scenarios in which the annual rate of non-renewable groundwater withdrawal peaks and declines over the twenty-first century.
Fig. 3: Global peak groundwater withdrawal rate and timing across SSPs in panels and RCPs as coloured bars within SSP panels.
Fig. 4: Experimental design showing combinatorial variations of 6 parameter categories used to design 900 GCAM scenarios.

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Data availability

The large-ensemble data repository contains relevant model outputs from 900 scenarios simulated using GCAM59. The data repository is to be used in combination with the meta-repository containing scripts and files for reproducing the experiment as well as for the analysis and post-processing of the model outputs60.

Code availability

The meta-repository containing and explaining usage of code, modelling files and input data could be accessed to reproduce experiments, results and visualizations presented in this study60.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, as part of research in MultiSector Dynamics of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for the DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830. Authors M.H., S.T. and S.M. primarily contributed to this work while at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone and should not be construed to represent any official USDA, USDOE or US Government determination or policy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, College Park, MD, USA

    Hassan Niazi, Thomas B. Wild, Neal T. Graham & Son Kim

  2. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA

    Sean W. D. Turner

  3. King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Mohamad Hejazi

  4. Economic Research Service, United States Department of Agriculture, Washington DC, USA

    Siwa Msangi

  5. Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Jonathan R. Lamontagne

  6. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

    Mengqi Zhao

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Contributions

All authors contributed to this study. M.H. and S.T. conceptualized the study. H.N., S.T., T.W. and N.G. conducted modelling and analysis, including designing scenario experiments, analysing GCAM modelling outputs and visualizing results, and all authors contributed towards the writing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Hassan Niazi.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Marc Bierkens, Inge de Graaf and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–24, Supplementary Tables 1–8, equations 1–4, 44 additional literature references and links to a publicly accessible meta-repository of data and code: https://github.com/JGCRI/niazi-etal_2024_nature-sustainability.

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Niazi, H., Wild, T.B., Turner, S.W.D. et al. Global peak water limit of future groundwater withdrawals. Nat Sustain 7, 413–422 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01306-w

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