Groundwater Quality in the Mediterranean Region

Abstract

In recent decades, the percentage increase in water use on a the global scale has exceeded twice that of population growth. This has led to more, and larger, regions in the world being subject to water stress where the current restricted rates of water use and consumption, let alone the desired rates, are unsustainable [1, 2]. In the Mediterranean area, water availability is a main economic and social target for most countries since most of them share several features including, for instance, similar water and land resources, agricultural development, demographic pressure coupled with tourism increase and, last but not least, a climate change evolving toward semiarid to arid conditions [3–5]. This precious resource, widely exploited, is not distributed, at a regional level and within each country, in a homogeneous fashion. The increase in groundwater exploitation poses a severe risk for the availability of water resources, and the resulting resource scarcity is a major concern in most countries of the Mediterranean region. Groundwater paucity often occurs in combination with poor groundwater quality, not only in areas heavily conditioned by human activities [6] or in the often highly saline coastal aquifers [7–9] but also in zones characterized by geogenic contamination sources. In such areas, although human pressure is absent, water-rock interaction processes, as those promoting, for instance, geogenic Cr(VI) water contamination [10], may cause pollution with critical effects on the public health