Groundwater is not a Common-Pool resource: Ordering sustainability issues of groundwater use

This paper primarily deals with sustainability issues linked to groundwater use. First, it shows that the debate on the traditional indicator to assess overdraft situations – average abstractions higher than average recharge – fails to introduce many dimensions of sustainability. A dynamic description of the effects of pumping and the introduction of the concept of capture, defined as the sum of the reduction of aquifer discharge and increase of recharge, allow identifying and classifying the impacts of pumping by order of appearance: downstream and ecological impacts happen before stock impacts that reduce availability of groundwater for current and future users through higher pumping costs. As the definition of groundwater as a Common-pool resource (CPR) is based on the occurrence of stock impacts, it transcribes a particular characteristic of the resource that ignores its ecological and basinwide functions. Thus, the validity and reproducibility of any recommendation from economic modeling or governance proposition (e.g. collective action) based only on stock impacts or groundwater as a CPR should be questioned.