The authors’ central claim is that global groundwater modelling has delivered an impressive diagnostic picture of depletion but a limited understanding of sustainable use. Over the past decade, large-scale hydrological models have mapped where water tables are falling fastest, from the High Plains aquifer in the United States to the Indo-Gangetic plain and the North China Plain. Studies such as the 2019 analysis led by de Graaf in Nature demonstrated that groundwater depletion is not a local curiosity but a global phenomenon, with falling water tables affecting streamflow and ecosystems across entire river basins. Complementary work by researchers including Bridget Scanlon and Carole Dalin has quantified the dependence of food systems on non-renewable aquifer storage, linking over-pumping to national food security and international food trade. Yet, as the Nature Water perspective points out, these efforts largely stop at the diagnosis.

The gap, according to the authors, lies in how the models are built. Most global assessments treat groundwater as a reservoir to be withdrawn, tracking the volume of water removed from storage. What they rarely capture is the full set of processes that connect pumping to the things society actually cares about: the yield of a wheat field under a given irrigation schedule, the baseflow that keeps a river alive through a dry summer, the depth at which a wetland’s vegetation can no longer reach the water table, or the feedback between soil moisture, evapotranspiration and crop physiology. Without those process-based links, a model can say that an aquifer is being depleted, but it cannot say what will happen to food production or to ecosystems if pumping is reduced by ten, twenty or fifty percent, nor where a given reduction would do the most good or the most harm.

To close this gap, de Graaf and her co-authors, including Anton Urfels of the International Rice Research Institute and Cornell University, Fatemeh Karandish, Sida Liu and Iwan Supit of Wageningen, propose a shift towards integrated, process-based frameworks that support decision-making across scales. In practical terms, this means coupling global groundwater models with crop growth models, ecohydrological representations of surface-water dependency, and the socio-economic realities of farming decisions. Crop models of the kind represented in the literature by work such as that of Joost Kroes on agrohydrology and Joseph Amthor on crop physiology simulate how plants respond to water stress, allowing researchers to translate a change in water availability directly into a change in yield. Ecohydrological theory, advanced by researchers such as Tom Gleeson, Mark Cuthbert and Donald Perrone, describes how aquifers exchange water with rivers and groundwater-dependent ecosystems, and how slowly those connections recover once disturbed.

The perspective also stresses that scale matters in ways current approaches handle poorly. A pumping decision is made by an individual farmer, in a specific field, in a particular season, often in response to rainfall that arrived or failed to arrive weeks earlier. Global models, by contrast, operate on grid cells of tens to hundreds of kilometres and on annual or monthly time steps. Between those two extremes lies the entire chain of cause and effect that determines whether groundwater use is sustainable. The authors argue that frameworks capable of moving information across these scales, from field-level agronomy up to basin-level water allocation and back down again in the form of policy-relevant guidance, are essential if groundwater governance is to be based on evidence rather than on crisis response.

Climate change sharpens the urgency of this argument. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented intensifying droughts and shifting precipitation patterns, and groundwater is increasingly treated as the buffer that will carry agriculture through a more volatile climate. But the perspective warns that treating aquifers as a climate insurance policy without understanding the environmental consequences risks simply transferring one crisis into another. When water tables fall, streams that depend on groundwater discharge lose flow, groundwater-dependent ecosystems degrade, and in coastal regions the void left by fresh water can be invaded by salt. Recent work by de Graaf and colleagues published in Environmental Research Letters in 2024, and by Cuthbert and colleagues in Nature Climate Change in 2019, has shown how slowly these systems respond to changes in pumping, with time lags that can span decades or centuries. Decisions made today may lock in environmental damage long after the agricultural benefits have been realised.

The food security dimension is equally stark. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food and Agriculture reports, along with analyses by Matti Kummu and colleagues on global food security, highlight how much of the world’s food production depends on water supplies that are under stress. In regions such as Iran, where Karandish and colleagues have published detailed analyses in the Journal of Hydrology in 2025, agriculture draws heavily on groundwater in semi-arid conditions where surface water is unreliable. In such settings, the trade-off between pumping for crops and preserving environmental flows is not an abstraction; it plays out every growing season in the choices farmers make about how much to irrigate and where. The authors argue that integrated frameworks can make these trade-offs explicit, quantifying the yield gained per unit of environmental harm and identifying management options, such as adjusted cropping patterns, deficit irrigation or targeted aquifer recharge, that shift the balance.

What distinguishes this perspective from a simple call for more modelling is its emphasis on decision support. The authors are explicit that the goal is not a bigger or more detailed simulation, but a framework that produces information usable by the people who allocate water: basin authorities designing pumping quotas, agricultural agencies advising on crop choices, and international bodies assessing food security risks. That requires models that represent adaptation itself, the ways farmers and water managers respond to scarcity, as part of the system rather than as an afterthought. It also requires honest treatment of uncertainty, since projections of future recharge, crop demand and ecosystem response all carry substantial error bars that decision-makers need to understand rather than ignore.

The work is grounded in a broader research programme. De Graaf leads a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, an ERC Starting Grant that supports the development of the integrated ideas presented in the paper. The perspective draws on a body of literature spanning hydrology, agronomy, environmental science and sustainability studies, from Konikow’s foundational estimates of global groundwater depletion to the recent syntheses of the field’s state of the art. In pulling these threads together, the authors are effectively issuing a roadmap for the next generation of groundwater science: less emphasis on measuring the hole we are digging, more emphasis on understanding the machinery that connects that hole to our food supply and our ecosystems.

The stakes could hardly be higher. Groundwater depletion is already reducing crop yields in some of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, and the ecosystems that depend on aquifers are among the fastest-disappearing on Earth. If the authors are right, the tools that revealed the problem are not, in their current form, the tools that will solve it. Building integrated, process-based frameworks that link the water table to the wheat field and the wetland, and that work at the scales where decisions are actually made, is presented as the necessary next step. Whether the research community and the policy world can build and apply such frameworks fast enough may help determine how much of the world’s hidden water, and the food and ecosystems it sustains, survives the coming decades.

Subject of Research: Integrated process-based groundwater modelling for balancing agricultural irrigation with environmental sustainability

Article Title: Balancing groundwater for crop production and a healthy environment

Article References: de Graaf, I., Urfels, A., Karandish, F., Liu, S., & Supit, I. (2026). Balancing groundwater for crop production and a healthy environment. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00720-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00720-y

Keywords: groundwater, depletion, irrigation, crop production, food security, hydrology, ecosystems, water management, global modelling, climate change, aquifers, sustainability

Socio-hydrogeology, as the preface defines it, recognises the reciprocal and recursive relationship between human societies and groundwater systems. It asks who has access to groundwater and for what purposes, how that access is shaped by social structures, how groundwater is governed, who holds decision-making authority and whose interests that governance serves, and which alternative understandings of groundwater exist beyond the conventions of western science. Crucially, the field places hydrogeological processes and socio-cultural dynamics in explicit co-production, coupling insights from the social sciences, arts and humanities with hydrogeological knowledge. While hydrogeology has long acknowledged societal influences on groundwater and vice versa, the explicit naming of socio-hydrogeology in 2015 signalled a shift: the social and cultural dimensions of groundwater moved from the margins of the discipline to a defining characteristic of its research frontier.

The special issue is organised around four broad themes: theories, frameworks and new paradigms; justice, power and decolonisation; governance and participatory engagement; and socio-hydrogeological systems and public health. Together, the contributions demonstrate that socio-hydrogeology is more than a bridge between hydrogeology and the social sciences. By foregrounding the hydrogeological, the field complements adjacent interdisciplinary enterprises such as socio-hydrology, socio-ecology and hydro-social approaches, while insisting on the particularity of groundwater, aquifers and hydrogeological processes in society. Typical subjects include access to drinking water, health-related dimensions of groundwater quality, economic uses spanning agriculture, industry and energy, and leisure activities such as thermal bathing, placing socio-hydrogeology in productive dialogue with urban hydrogeology, medical hydrogeology and groundwater quality research.

The first thematic section confronts conventional understandings of groundwater itself. Re and colleagues trace the development of the field and call for the social and cultural dimensions of groundwater, and the skills needed to engage with them, to be addressed explicitly in hydrogeological education. Söller and colleagues show that inter- and trans-disciplinary knowledge co-production between scientists and stakeholders is critical for tackling complex socio-hydrogeological challenges and for developing context-specific, sustainable management strategies. Cuthbert traces the historical and cultural evolution of groundwater understanding in western societies, arguing that its reduction to an abstract resource obscures its relational nature and limits more sustainable ways of engaging with it. In perhaps the most striking contribution, RiverOfLife and colleagues draw on Indigenous knowledge from the Martuwarra Fitzroy River region of Australia, presenting an understanding of groundwater entangled with culture, knowledge and ancestral personhood, and arguing for more just and cooperative approaches to water governance. Healy then reconceptualises aquifers as active, more-than-human agents capable of influencing their environments through performative interactions, potentially opening new perspectives on water-society relations and development pathways.

The second section tackles power, justice and the legacy of colonialism head-on. Bourke and colleagues highlight how enduring colonial influences continue to shape hydrogeological practice and groundwater governance, calling for more inclusive, rights-based approaches that centre Indigenous and local community knowledge. Hamilton examines Australia’s Great Artesian Basin, arguing that the perceived unknowability of groundwater there, alongside claims of scientific uncertainty, was historically constructed and politically leveraged to resist regulation, shaping enduring patterns of over-extraction and governance. Taylor and colleagues contend that integrating water justice principles with hydrogeological science is essential for equitable and effective management frameworks in the face of climate change and growing resource pressures, while Nelson and colleagues show that gaps and inconsistencies in governance frameworks can undermine protections for vulnerable communities. Agrawal explores how diverse actors construct and negotiate groundwater, producing what the preface describes as a classed, casted and more-than-human assemblage of aquifers, tube wells and water flows.

Governance and participatory engagement form the third pillar of the collection, illustrated through a remarkably diverse set of case studies. Milman and Roberts show how ambiguities embedded in California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, arising from institutional, informational and governance gaps, generated divergent interpretations during implementation, leading to uneven outcomes and reduced policy effectiveness. Mustafa and colleagues demonstrate that collaborative modelling with stakeholders can simultaneously improve the capabilities of hydrogeological models and the understanding and acceptance of model results. At the community scale, Loh and colleagues show that collective action and social learning among farmers in Ghana’s Keta Strip are critical to sustainable groundwater management, since uncoordinated individual use and weak institutional support can drive resource depletion. Frommen and Groeschke report on participatory groundwater management in Jaipur, India, finding that participatory socio-hydrogeological approaches are essential for water projects that are both sustainable and responsive to local realities. Basel and colleagues show that community-led, small-scale managed aquifer recharge can mitigate drought impacts, with effectiveness shaped by both hydrological conditions and social dynamics, and Gleeson advocates integrating arts-based research into hydrogeology to deepen cultural and emotional connections to groundwater.

The final section connects groundwater to place-based systems and public health. Using qualitative systems mapping in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, Carrard and colleagues conceptualise groundwater-based water services as complex socio-hydrogeological systems, highlighting the interlinked roles of household behaviour, resource sustainability and climate pressures in shaping governance and water security. Joshi reveals that groundwater monitoring in western India is not merely a technical task but a deeply social and political practice, proposing a grounded, pluralistic vision for socio-hydrogeology that listens, learns and reflects across disciplinary, institutional and cultural boundaries. On the health front, de Sousa and colleagues advance understanding of the water security-drought-health nexus, demonstrating that increased access to groundwater in drought-affected regions of semi-arid Brazil is associated with improved water security and reduced diarrhoea-related hospitalisations, underscoring the importance of integrating groundwater and drought management under climate change. Bhowmik and colleagues evaluate arsenic-safe drinking water options in India’s Western Bengal Basin, finding that existing community treatment systems often fail due to technical and social limitations, while locally accessible groundwater sources may offer a more feasible interim solution when guided by hydrogeological and socio-economic conditions.

The preface is candid about the field’s growing pains. One persistent challenge is the prevalence of scholarship that borrows approaches from other disciplines without truly integrating them. As Zwarteveen and colleagues recently identified in the adjacent field of socio-hydrology, science is situated: authors tend to approach studies either from natural science or social science perspectives, and genuinely integrative approaches remain less common. This reinforces the call from Re and colleagues to reform the content of hydrogeological education so that future hydrogeologists can meld understandings and methods from the natural and social sciences more fully. A more inclusive hydrogeological pedagogy, the editors argue, underpins many of the special issue’s contributions, from raising awareness of alternative terminologies to recognising how terms are understood differently across academic disciplines.

Looking forward, the preface identifies hydrogeological justice as a potentially substantive future agenda, encompassing both distributional and epistemic justice. This raises challenging new questions about what groundwater is, who it is for, over what timeframes, and how human demands should be balanced against the rights of non-human others, the so-called more-than-human world. There is also an emergent literature offering critical reflection on the ontologies and accepted practices that underlie hydrogeology itself, encouraging researchers to interrogate the assumed objectivity of their science and to recognise their own positionality and that of the methods and models they employ. For a discipline that is inherently place-based, the editors conclude, hydrogeology will always be socially and culturally aware; the task now is to make that awareness systematic, reflexive and transformative.

What emerges from this decade of scholarship is a portrait of hydrogeology advancing as a critical, progressive and reflexive science. The special issue shows that inter- and trans-disciplinary, context-centred approaches can bring genuinely new perspectives to groundwater science and its governance, providing fertile ground for interdisciplinary research, justice-oriented governance and a more inclusive hydrogeological discourse. As aquifers worldwide face depletion, contamination and climate stress, the message of socio-hydrogeology is clear: the technical questions of how much water lies underground can no longer be separated from the human questions of who gets it, who decides, and whose knowledge counts. The guest editors express the hope that others will join this journey in the decade to come.

Subject of Research: Socio-hydrogeology: the integration of social, cultural and justice dimensions into groundwater science and governance

Article Title: Preface: Advances in socio-hydrogeology

Article References: Healy, A., Re, V., Walker, D. W., Bourke, S., Frommen, T., Vora, S., de Carvalho, A. M., & Shiinda, G. (2026). Preface: Advances in socio-hydrogeology. Hydrogeology Journal, 34(6), 1635-1638. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10040-026-03151-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10040-026-03151-x

Keywords: socio-hydrogeology, groundwater, aquifers, water governance, hydrogeological justice, Indigenous knowledge, participatory research, decolonisation, water security, public health, managed aquifer recharge, hydrogeology education