Groundwater and Ecosystems: A Survey of Regulatory Mechanisms for Making the Connection

As the water management world has moved from an era of water development to the modern era of water management, sustainability concerns are paramount. Sustainability relates not just to water supply reliability, but also to ecological impacts. In the surface water sphere, the influence of sustainability concerns on water law is clear—it manifests through mechanisms like wild and scenic river designations, instream flow rights, and public trust considerations in the permitting process, to name a few. In the groundwater sphere, the potential ecological effects of pumping are relatively seldom considered by water law on paper, and even more rarely considered by water rights administrators in practice. Yet science reveals that species and ecosystems may depend partially or wholly on groundwater for their water needs (for example, forests and desert springs, respectively), and that groundwater pumping can therefore affect these groundwater-dependent ecosystems (GDEs). Water laws that fail to recognize these connections both on paper and also in practice may mean inadvertently allowing groundwater pumping to damage or destroy GDEs. This presentation investigates the legal and institutional mechanisms available to recognize these connections, the contexts in which they occur, and issues that arise in designing and implementing these mechanisms across the United States. It contrasts these with their counterparts in Australia—a country, which, like the United States, faces the twin challenges of providing water to support consumptive and environmental values in the context of frequent water scarcity.