A new multidisciplinary approach for groundwater resources sustainability in arid regions: case study from Fujairah Emirate

Population growth, and enhanced irrigation practices in arid regions have driven an increase in groundwater mining for agricultural purposes over the past seventy years. The World Economic Forum identified water-scarcity issues as the foremost global risk in 2023. Improper water resources management in arid areas can be attributed to several factors: inaccurate assessment of available water resources and their sources of replenishment, and the misconception that climate change uniformly exerts negative impacts across all times and regions, which is not accurate. Additionally, there is a lack of interdisciplinary approaches in evaluating and planning water resources in general, and agricultural water in particular. The challenge of water scarcity jeopardizes both water and food security in arid regions, primarily due to improper management rather than insufficient water availability. Most existing water security models primarily focus on large-scale variations, often at the national level. While such approaches provide a rapid assessment of water security challenges, their utility for local-scale water resources planning is highly limited. Addressing this shortcoming constitutes the central focus and primary innovation of the present study. The developed multidisciplinary framework was adopted to evaluate water availability and security, integrating a GIS-based Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), groundwater budget modeling, estimation of groundwater extraction rates, and assessment of replenishment ratios from multiple recharge sources. The resulting analyses were then applied to develop several sustainable management alternatives for groundwater resources in both surficial and deep aquifers of the Fujairah Emirate, United Arab Emirates, serving as a representative case study of arid-region conditions.