Groundwater is a critical natural resource, but the law has always struggled with it. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the common law developed several doctrines to allocate groundwater among competing users. The groundwater revolution of the mid-20th century produced an explosive growth in pumping worldwide—and quickly exposed the flaws of these doctrines. Legal rules predicated on land and on surface waters could not meet the challenges posed by the common-pool groundwater resource: those of understanding groundwater dynamics, quantifying the impacts of pumping on other water rights, and devising satisfactory remedies. Unfettered by received property restraints, pumping on an industrial, aquifer-wide scale depleted and contaminated aquifers, regardless of doctrine.
The groundwater revolution motivated significant legal developments. Starting in the 1970s, the Supreme Court of the United States adapted its methods for resolving interstate water disputes to include the effects of groundwater pumping. This jurisprudence has fundamentally influenced international groundwater law, including the negotiation of trans-boundary aquifer agreements. Advances in hydrogeology and computer groundwater modeling have enabled states and parties to evaluate the effects of basin-wide pumping. Nonetheless, difficult legal and governance problems remain. Which level of government—local, state, or national—should exercise jurisdiction over groundwater? What level of pumping qualifies as “safe yield,” especially when the aquifer is overdrawn? How do the demands of modern environmental law and the public trust doctrine affect groundwater rights? How can governments satisfy long-neglected claims to water justice made by Indigenous and minority communities? Innovations in groundwater management provide promising answers. The conjunctive management of surface and groundwater can stabilize water supplies, improve water quality, and protect ecosystems. Integrated water resources management seeks to holistically manage groundwater to achieve social and economic equity. Water markets can reward water conservation, attract new market participants, and encourage the migration of groundwater allocations to more valuable uses, including environmental uses.
The modern law of groundwater allocation combines older property doctrines with 21st-century regulatory ideals, but the mixture can be unstable. In nations with long-established water codes such as the United States, common-law Anglophone nations, and various European nations, groundwater law has evolved, if haltingly, to incorporate permitting systems, environmental regulation, and water markets. Elsewhere, the challenges are extreme. Long-standing calls for groundwater reform in India remain unheeded as tens of millions of unregulated tube wells pump away. In China, chronic groundwater mismanagement and aquifer contamination belie the roseate claims of national water law. Sub-Saharan nations have enacted progressive groundwater laws, but poverty, racism, and corruption have maintained grim groundwater realities. Across the field, experts have long identified the central problems and reached a rough consensus about the most effective solutions; there is also a common commitment to secure environmental justice and protect groundwater-dependent ecosystems. The most pressing legal work thus requires building practical pathways to reach these solutions and, most importantly, to connect the public with the groundwater on which it increasingly depends.
Article
The Allocation of Groundwater: From Superstition to Science
Burke W. Griggs
Article
Environmental Economics and Uncertainty: Review and a Machine Learning Outlook
Ruda Zhang, Patrick Wingo, Rodrigo Duran, Kelly Rose, Jennifer Bauer, and Roger Ghanem
Economic assessment in environmental science means measuring and evaluating environmental impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Integrated assessment modeling (IAM) is a unifying framework of environmental economics, which attempts to combine key elements of physical, ecological, and socioeconomic systems. The first part of this article reviews the literature on the IAM framework: its components, relations between the components, and examples.
For such models to inform environmental decision-making, they must quantify the uncertainties associated with their estimates. Uncertainty characterization in integrated assessment varies by component models: uncertainties associated with mechanistic physical models are often assessed with an ensemble of simulations or Monte Carlo sampling, while uncertainties associated with impact models are evaluated by conjecture or econometric analysis. The second part of this article reviews the literature on uncertainty in integrated assessment, by type and by component.
Probabilistic learning on manifolds (PLoM) is a machine learning technique that constructs a joint probability model of all relevant variables, which may be concentrated on a low-dimensional geometric structure. Compared to traditional density estimation methods, PLoM is more efficient especially when the data are generated by a few latent variables. With the manifold-constrained joint probability model learned by PLoM from a small, initial sample, manifold sampling creates new samples for evaluating converged statistics, which helps answer policy-making questions from prediction, to response, and prevention. As a concrete example, this article reviews IAMs of offshore oil spills—which integrate environmental models, transport models, spill scenarios, and exposure metrics—and demonstrates the use of manifold sampling in assessing the risk of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
Article
Material and Energy Flow Analysis
Vincent Moreau and Guillaume Massard
The concept of metabolism takes root in biology and ecology as a systematic way to account for material flows in organisms and ecosystems. Early applications of the concept attempted to quantify the amount of water and food the human body processes to live and sustain itself. Similarly, ecologists have long studied the metabolism of critical substances and nutrients in ecological succession towards climax. With industrialization, the material and energy requirements of modern economic activities have grown exponentially, together with emissions to the air, water and soil. From an analogy with ecosystems, the concept of metabolism grew into an analytical methodology for economic systems.
Research in the field of material flow analysis has developed approaches to modeling economic systems by assessing the stocks and flows of substances and materials for systems defined in space and time. Material flow analysis encompasses different methods: industrial and urban metabolism, input–output analysis, economy-wide material flow accounting, socioeconomic metabolism, and more recently material flow cost accounting. Each method has specific scales, reference substances such as metals, and indicators such as concentration. A material flow analysis study usually consists of a total of four consecutive steps: (a) system definition, (b) data acquisition, (c) calculation, and (d) interpretation. The law of conservation of mass underlies every application, which implies that all material flows, as well as stocks, must be accounted for.
In the early 21st century, material depletion, accumulation, and recycling are well-established cases of material flow analysis. Diagnostics and forecasts, as well as historical or backcast analyses, are ideally performed in a material flow analysis, to identify shifts in material consumption for product life cycles or physical accounting and to evaluate the material and energy performance of specific systems.
In practice, material flow analysis supports policy and decision making in urban planning, energy planning, economic and environmental performance, development of industrial symbiosis and eco industrial parks, closing material loops and circular economy, pollution remediation/control and material and energy supply security. Although material flow analysis assesses the amount and fate of materials and energy rather than their environmental or human health impacts, a tacit assumption states that reduced material throughputs limit such impacts.
Article
Monitoring and Modeling of Outdoor Air Pollution
Stefan Reis
Air pollution has been a major threat to human health, ecosystems, and agricultural crops ever since the onset of widespread use of fossil fuel combustion and emissions of harmful substances into ambient air. As a basis for the development, implementation, and compliance assessment of air pollution control policies, monitoring networks for priority air pollutants were established, primarily for regulatory purposes. With increasing understanding of emission sources and the release and environmental fate of chemicals and toxic substances into ambient air, as well as atmospheric transport and chemical conversion processes, increasingly complex air pollution models have entered the scene. Today, highly accurate equipment is available to measure trace gases and aerosols in the atmosphere. In addition, sophisticated atmospheric chemistry transport models—which are routinely compared to and validated and assessed against measurements—are used to model dispersion and chemical processes affecting the composition of the atmosphere, and the resulting ambient concentrations of harmful pollutants. The models also provide methods to quantify the deposition of pollutants, such as acidifying and eutrophying substances, in vegetation, soils, and freshwater ecosystems. This article provides a general overview of the underlying concepts and key features of monitoring and modeling systems for outdoor air pollution.
