December 2016

The IAH Commission on Transboundary Aquifers has launched a website (http://isarm.org/IAH-TBACommission) that attempts to bring together all available information related to transboundary groundwater. This website contains an overview of transboundary aquifer projects and another overview with publications. It is a collaborative environment and the IAH TBA commission invites groundwater experts to start adding their projects and publications by filling out submission forms.

IGRAC has launched a new viewer with groundwater information from the Dinaric Karst region of the Balkan Peninsula. This map viewer contains the results from the DIKTAS project and is part of the Global Groundwater Information System (GGIS). The viewer is designed to provide information to a wide group of stakeholders, like groundwater users and those engaged in the management of the groundwater resources in the region.

On Tuesday December 6th, the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) and the Government of the Netherlands reaffirmed their commitment to IGRAC by signing a new agreement until 2022. This agreement was signed by Ms. Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, and Ms. Margot Llompart, Deputy Permanent Delegate of the Netherlands to UNESCO, at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France.

This week, IGRAC Director Neno Kukuric contributed to the session 'Groundwater Sustainability - How can we manage the commons under uncertainty?' of the Budapest Water Summit 2016. During this session, he highlighted the importance of sustainable management groundwater and raising awareness about this hidden resource. The summit took place from 28 till 30 November 2016 in the Millenáris Park in Budapest, Hungary.

Recently, IGRAC has launched the MAR Portal, which contains data resulting from the Global MAR Inventory with 1200 case studies from over 50 countries. This data was compiled and analysed INOWAS, DEMEAU and IAH-MAR Commission. Building on this inventory, IGRAC now offers other organisations and researcher to contribute to the MAR Portal by adding MAR data.

IGRAC has published an open access report on 'Assessing Groundwater Stress: An approach of measuring groundwater stress based on sub-national statistical data'. This report, written by Benedikt Ahner, presents a scheme on how to process sub-national water withdrawal and use datasets specified by source and sectoral use, for (ground)water stress calculations at various scales.