Groundwater Management Policies in Asian Mega-Cities

Abstract

Groundwater is an easily accessible, cheap and high quality water resource. Because of its suitability for various purposes, groundwater is used in the course of socio-economic development of modern cities, and is especially used in the early stages of development. However, groundwater exploitation is not well managed or controlled in many cases, and groundwater sources are exploited intensively without consideration of their recharge rates. As a result, such intensive use causes drawdowns of water tables that are associated with other environmental problems such as land subsidence and saltwater intrusion. Such problems caused by intensive groundwater use are often irreversible or take a long time to remedy. Therefore, immediate actions for mitigation or prevention should be taken. However, it is often difficult for national and/or local governments to regulate groundwater abstraction for various reasons, including limited water resources available in a city, increasing demand and failure to resolve competition among different beneficial uses. This chapter describes the current status of groundwater management in Asian mega-cities through case studies of three cities, namely Bandung (Indonesia), Bangkok Thailand) and Osaka (Japan), which face problems related to groundwater use. These three cities are at different stages of socio-economic development and have different political backgrounds.