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61,005 resultsShowing papers similar to Groundwater resources: challenges and future opportunities
ClearTopical Collection: International Year of Groundwater—managing future societal and environmental challenges
Researchers and hydrogeologists highlight the growing importance of groundwater in the global water cycle and call for better assessment, management, and public communication strategies to meet the UN's water-related Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Groundwater resources: Challenges & solutions
This review examined the global challenges facing groundwater resources, including over-extraction, contamination by agricultural chemicals and microplastics, and salinization. It assessed emerging solutions including managed aquifer recharge, advanced monitoring, and international governance frameworks for sustainable groundwater management.
Groundwater quality: global challenges, emerging threats and novel approaches
This review highlights global groundwater quality challenges including emerging contaminants and antimicrobial resistance, emphasizing the need for significantly improved monitoring to identify and mitigate threats from historical and future pollution sources.
Future Global Groundwater Quality Challenges
This review outlines emerging and legacy groundwater quality challenges that threaten drinking water security globally, including microplastic contamination alongside chemical and microbial pollutants. The authors call for improved monitoring and treatment infrastructure to protect future groundwater supplies.
Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem
This study presents a global analysis showing that groundwater is a foundational ecosystem that supports over half of the world's land surface areas, yet it remains largely overlooked in conservation efforts. Researchers argue that groundwater should be recognized as a keystone ecosystem because its health directly influences rivers, wetlands, and other surface habitats. The findings call for including groundwater in global biodiversity protection frameworks before further depletion and pollution cause irreversible damage.
Environmental chemistry, toxicity and health risk assessment of groundwater: Environmental persistence and management strategies
This review examines groundwater contamination from heavy metals, pesticides, microplastics, and emerging pollutants, assessing health risks and highlighting the need for integrated management strategies to protect this critical freshwater resource.
Addressing water resource management challenges in the context of climate change and human influence
This study identifies and documents the key challenges facing water resource management due to the combined pressures of climate change and human activity. Researchers found that droughts, floods, sea-level rise, and pollution are threatening both water quality and public health on a global scale. The study emphasizes that more sustainable approaches to water governance and infrastructure are urgently needed to address the growing gap between water supply and demand.
Drought and Groundwater Development
This paper is not about microplastics; it is a review or study of groundwater resources and their relationship to drought.
Groundwater is a hidden global keystone ecosystem
This study argues that groundwater should be recognized as a "keystone ecosystem" because of its critical role in sustaining surface environments, biodiversity, and human water supplies. Over half of the world's land surface has significant interaction with groundwater, yet it remains overlooked in conservation planning. Protecting groundwater is essential for planetary health, including safeguarding water sources from emerging contaminants like microplastics.
Sources and Consequences of Groundwater Contamination
Researchers reviewed sources and health consequences of groundwater contamination across India, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, summarizing both geogenic pollutants (naturally occurring) and anthropogenic contaminants while identifying key gaps in remediation technology and monitoring capacity.
Groundwater–Surface Water Interactions: Recent Advances and Interdisciplinary Challenges
This review covers recent advances in understanding groundwater–surface water interactions, including their importance for drinking water security and contaminant transport, and argues for interdisciplinary approaches that combine hydrology, ecology, and geochemistry.
Review of Current Issues and Management Strategies of Microplastics in Groundwater Environments
This review synthesizes current knowledge on microplastic contamination in groundwater, identifying it as a substantially understudied environment compared to surface water and marine systems. The authors describe pathways by which microplastics enter aquifers and discuss management strategies for this largely invisible contamination route.
Microplastics in groundwater: a global analysis
Researchers conducted a global groundwater sampling study to characterize microplastic contamination in aquifer systems worldwide, investigating transport mechanisms and fate of particles in anoxic subsurface environments where knowledge gaps remain despite extensive research on surface water systems.
Insights into Global Water Reuse Opportunities
This review examines global opportunities and challenges for reusing treated wastewater, which is becoming increasingly important as water scarcity worsens worldwide. A key concern discussed is that recycled water may contain emerging contaminants including microplastics that current treatment methods do not fully remove. The findings highlight the need for advanced treatment technologies to ensure that water reuse does not become a pathway for microplastic exposure in communities.
Current status of researches on microplastics in groundwater and perspectives
This review examines the current status of microplastic research in groundwater systems internationally, identifying that despite growing attention to microplastics in surface and marine waters, groundwater investigations remain sparse both in South Korea and globally. Researchers diagnosed gaps in monitoring methodology and management frameworks, proposing directions for more effective groundwater microplastic assessment.
Sustainable Water Infrastructure: Visions and Options for Sub-Saharan Africa
This review assesses the challenges facing water infrastructure sustainability in Sub-Saharan Africa, including aging systems, limited resources, and environmental pressures. Researchers evaluated global interventions and assessed their relevance to the African context using a framework that considers societal, technological, economic, environmental, and political dimensions. The study recommends an expanded analytical approach to develop more resilient and sustainable water systems for the region.
Groundwater dependent ecosystems in coastal Mediterranean regions: Characterization, challenges and management for their protection
Researchers reviewed the status of coastal groundwater-dependent ecosystems (wetlands and lagoons sustained by aquifer discharge) in Mediterranean regions, identifying plastic pollution, over-extraction, and weak governance as critical threats, and calling for new legal definitions and transdisciplinary management frameworks to protect them.
Groundwater systems under siege: The silent invasion of microplastics and cock-tails worldwide
This review reveals that groundwater, a critical drinking water source for billions of people, is increasingly contaminated with microplastics from surface pollution seeping downward through soil. Unlike ocean and river pollution, groundwater microplastic contamination has received far less research attention, leaving major gaps in understanding how plastics migrate underground. The findings are alarming because contaminated groundwater directly enters drinking water supplies with little to no treatment in many regions.
Trends of global concerns on groundwater contamination and future directions
A bibliometric review of nearly 39,000 groundwater contamination studies from 1991–2024 tracks a shift in research focus from classic pollutants toward emerging contaminants including microplastics, PFAS, and pharmaceuticals, while noting most of these remain unregulated. The review is relevant to microplastic risk assessment because it identifies groundwater — a source of drinking water for billions — as a frontier where microplastic research and regulation urgently need to catch up.
Mapping Global Research Trends in Groundwater Quality (2010–2025): a Bibliometric Perspective
Researchers conducted a bibliometric analysis of groundwater quality research published in Scopus between 2010 and 2025, identifying key publication trends, influential authors, and emerging themes including microplastic pollution, extreme event-driven contamination, and AI-based monitoring techniques, while mapping the evolution of interdisciplinary approaches integrating climate science, environmental engineering, and public health.
Groundwater in the age of plastic
This review examines microplastic contamination of groundwater globally, synthesizing studies on occurrence, transport pathways through soil and aquifer matrices, and the emerging implications for drinking water safety and groundwater ecosystem health.
A global hydrology research agenda fit for the 2030s
A group of global hydrology researchers outlines priority research questions for freshwater science through 2030, identifying key knowledge gaps around water quality, ecosystem health, and emerging contaminants including microplastics. The agenda calls for more integrated monitoring and modeling to address growing pressures on freshwater resources worldwide.
Global status, risk assessment, and knowledge gaps of microplastics in groundwater: A bibliometric analysis
This review analyzed 215 published studies on microplastics in groundwater and found that this area of research is still in its early stages compared to surface water studies. Evidence indicates that microplastic contamination is present in groundwater worldwide, but sampling methods and reported results vary widely. The authors identified significant knowledge gaps in understanding how microplastics move through underground water systems and what risks they may pose to drinking water sources.
Groundwater Pollution and Contamination: Sources, Impacts, Management, and the Integration of AI/ML for Future Solutions
This review covers the sources, health impacts, and management strategies for groundwater pollution, including contamination from agricultural runoff, industrial waste, and landfill leachate. While broadly focused on water quality, the paper is relevant to microplastic concerns because contaminated groundwater is a drinking water source for billions of people, and emerging pollutants including microplastics are increasingly found in these systems.