Protecting what's underneath the tap

Abstract

Groundwater protection Protecting groundwater resources, especially those used for domestic purposes, remains a challenges in South Africa. Harrison Pienaar and Yongxin Xu explore the fundamental principles and challenges of groundwater protection while proposing a framework model for undertaking groundwater source and aquifer protection zoning in South Africa. surface water quality in streams fed by baseflow. Remediation of polluted aquifers is expensive and technically difficult. Groundwater moves slowly so the impact of human activities can potentially last a long time. However, there is currently no policy in South Africa that directly addresses the protection of groundwater used for drinking water. Groundwater protection is addressed to a limited extent through resource directed measures (RDM), however, although often on an ad hoc basis. As protection of all aquifers is considered impossible in South Africa, a differentiated protection policy, where priority is given to important and vulnerable aquifers, has been proposed as the optimum solution.

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