EFG Webinar: Tackling the 21st Century Water Quality Challenges for Managed Aquifer Recharge

On 15 November 2022, the European Federation of Geologists (EFG) is organising the webinar ‘Tackling the 21st Century Water Quality Challenges for Managed Aquifer Recharge‘. The event is scheduled for 13:00 – 14:00 CET (Brussels time).

The presenter of the webinar will be Dr Yan Zheng, Chair Professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China. The host of the session will be Dr Tamás Madarász, Professor and Head of the Institute of Environmental Management at the University of Miskolc in Hungary, and a Member of the EFG Panel of Experts on Hydrogeology.

The sustainability of groundwater is threatened by overexploitation and by pollution, exacerbated by perturbations of hydrological cycle stemming from climate change exerting poorly understood water quantity and quality risks with uncertain outcomes. Managed aquifer recharge (MAR) has been shown as a sustainable nature-based engineering approach for enhancing climate resilience and other social, economic and environmental benefits of groundwater. Yet to continue MAR implementation, water quality and quantity challenges both need to be addressed to maintain resource integrity. This presentation discusses how MAR professionals may tackle the 21st century water quality challenges. New findings on incomplete biodegradation of antibiotics, a type of trace organic pollutants, will be described. Given the threat of a large number of novel chemical and biological entities, it is suggested that groundwater monitoring programs pay more attention to them when justified, especially when MAR is used to bank large quantities of groundwater. Policy recommendations such as demarcating a subsurface attenuation zone to continue to take advantage of the natural purification ability of the soil-aquifer systems, and moving towards a risk-based regulatory approach for MAR under the framework of water recycling, will be presented. ​

Find more information and registration at the following link: https://bit.ly/3SGx3HH