Classification of Groundwater Sustainability Assessment Indicators in Aquifers of Arid and Semi-Arid Regions

Considering the increasing dependence of humans on fresh water, especially groundwater, which is the most important source of water supply in arid and semi-arid regions, assessing the sustainability of aquifers is crucial. In this regard, assessment indicators are used, which usually do not have a clear boundary between the classification of indicators and they overlap with each other in different fields such as economy, society and environment. Also, researchers usually rely on a number of indicators that can be measured for their case study. Due to this lack of data, in this article, an attempt has been made to collect and categorize various indicators that have been used to assess groundwater in aquifers in arid and semi-arid regions of the world.

This research has been a literature review of previous articles and studies in the world in the field of assessing the sustainability of groundwater based on different indicators. The course of movement and progress of these indicators in articles and their classification in environmental, social, economic and institutional categories has been in the framework of this research. Also, the composite indicators that have been prepared for topics under the sustainability subcategory, such as the water poverty index, have been considered in this research. The water poverty indicator is a subset of the competition criterion and a social indicator. This indicator has been proposed as a subset of the water competition criterion, which is an important indicator for measuring the level of poverty caused by water scarcity, especially in arid and semi-arid lands such as significant parts of West Asian countries. In other words, this indicator connects water and poverty. 

The results indicate that the environmental indicators with a share of 63% have the highest number among the articles and physical indicators include more than half of the environmental indicators. After that, economic indicators with 18%, social indicators with 14% and institutional indicators with 7% are in the next ranks in terms of numbers, which shows the attention of experts to the importance of the environment and economy on the sustainability of aquifers.

Although social indicators comprise only 13% of all indicators, but due to their importance and weight, they need more studying. Also, these types of indicators are mainly dependent on the case study, so using the studies of sociologists is a great help for real investigation and it will aim at the sustainability of aquifers. Also, due to the fact that sustainability evaluation is an interdisciplinary field, the selection of its indicators needs strong theoretical foundations, therefore, team work with the presence of different experts will increase the quality of the study results. Considering that the institutional indicators mainly play the role of the answer in the issue of aquifer sustainability, therefore, compiling institutional indicators in the future and including a logical weight for these indicators during the assessment of sustainability is very important in raising the quality of the assessment. Institutional indicators are mainly related to governance, and considering that the development approach is to reduce the concentration of management from top to bottom, there are fewer institutional indicators and the focus is on other indicators.