Monday, October 13, 2008 : 9:40 a.m.

Water Rights and Ground Water Mining: A Paradigmatic Case in La Mancha (Spain)

Lucia De Stefano and Pedro Martínez-Santos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

  Over the last decades groundwater use experienced a spectacular increase in the entire world, enabling the development of formerly depressed areas. This “silent revolution” was led by millions of individuals who drilled wells to access groundwater to feed different economic activities. Due to aquifer strategic role, Governments have often issued regulations to control or, at least, to track this “revolution”. This is particularly relevant in intensively exploited or non-renewable aquifers, where uncontrolled groundwater use can give rise to conflicts among users and environmental degradation. Groundwater legal control, however, all but easy and system failures can have significant negative consequences. The Mancha Occidental aquifer (central Spain) represents a paradigmatic example of how ineffective enforcement of groundwater use regulations can create and even consolidate groundwater mining practices, leading to entangled legal situations. The Mancha Occidental aquifer (5,500km2) feeds intensive irrigation agriculture, which currently accounts for 95% of the total water uses. The legally assigned rights (600-800 Mm3) are over twice the recharge (300 Mm3/yr). This mismatch between assigned and available resources, coupled with illegal drilling of over 20,000 additional wells (legal ones are 16,000), caused water table drawdowns up to 1m/yr between the 1970s and the 1990s. The water table is currently 20m below its natural level, affecting internationally protected wetlands and causing severe water-related disputes. Water authorities have applied different legal and economic instruments to find a way out, all to no avail. European Union environmental regulations now require water authorities to solve the riddle of recovering the water table levels while farmers firmly defend their wells, no matter if legal or illegal. This paper presents this legal jigsaw and the use of dispute-solving instruments such as water market setting up to find a way out of groundwater mining.

Lucia De Stefano, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Dr. Lucia De Stefano graduated in Geological Sciences at the Universitá degli Studi di Pavia (Italy) and received her PhD. at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, with a dissertation on water policy assessment in European countries. She currently works as a water policy officer for the World Wildlife Fund in Spain and is adjunct professor at the Geodynamics Department of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Prior to this, she worked in the private sector managing research projects on land and water management.

Pedro Martínez-Santos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Dr. Martinez-Santos completed his Honours Bachelor of Civil Engineering (2000) and Masters of Technology Management (2002) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, before undertaking his PhD studies at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, on the topic of groundwater resources management. He has worked on several projects funded by the European Union, the Spanish government and a number of private companies. These have focused mostly on groundwater modelling and management.


The NGWA International Conference on Nonrenewable Ground Water Resources — Sociotechnological Aspects of Nonrenewable Ground Water Resources: Half-Empty, Half-Full, Top-Down, Bottom-Up, and Some Paths Forward