Accord­ing to Unit­ed Nations data, in the ear­ly 2000s more than 1.2 bil­lion peo­ple lived under con­di­tions of con­stant fresh­wa­ter scarci­ty, while about 2 bil­lion expe­ri­enced it reg­u­lar­ly. Accord­ing to the UN Report “Water and Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment of the World”, pre­sent­ed on March 20, 2015, in New Del­hi (India), with­in the next 15 years the world’s pop­u­la­tion is expect­ed to face a water deficit of at least 40%. One of the main rea­sons for this fore­cast is the deple­tion of ground­wa­ter reserves.

Despite the rel­a­tive­ly large glob­al reserves of fresh­wa­ter on Earth, water scarci­ty is already increas­ing­ly felt almost every­where in pop­u­lat­ed regions of the world. This is caused by sev­er­al fac­tors:

• uneven dis­tri­b­u­tion of water resources across the Earth’s sur­face;
• rapid pop­u­la­tion growth world­wide and high con­cen­tra­tion of peo­ple in cer­tain regions, large cities, and urban agglom­er­a­tions;
• increas­ing water con­sump­tion in agri­cul­ture and indus­try;
• pol­lu­tion of water resources by waste­water and indus­tri­al waste.

What about Ukraine? To what extent are these prob­lems rel­e­vant for our coun­try? Obvi­ous­ly, a sharp increase in water demand due to eco­nom­ic growth or pop­u­la­tion growth is cur­rent­ly not a key issue for Ukraine. How­ev­er, giv­en the sig­nif­i­cant lev­el of eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment of its ter­ri­to­ry, ground­wa­ter is an essen­tial min­er­al resource of strate­gic impor­tance, serv­ing as a reli­able and pro­tect­ed source of high-qual­i­ty drink­ing water sup­ply for the pop­u­la­tion. At present, the share of ground­wa­ter in Ukraine’s domes­tic drink­ing water sup­ply is less than 25%. Ukraine also has sig­nif­i­cant poten­tial to increase ground­wa­ter extrac­tion, as only about 26% of its pre­dict­ed ground­wa­ter resources have been explored.

Cur­rent­ly, around 700 deposits of drink­ing and tech­ni­cal ground­wa­ter have been iden­ti­fied in Ukraine. The total fore­cast­ed ground­wa­ter resources amount to 61,689.2 thou­sand m³/day, of which 57,499.9 thou­sand m³/day have min­er­al­iza­tion up to 1500 mg/dm³. These resources are dis­trib­uted uneven­ly across the coun­try: the major­i­ty is con­cen­trat­ed in the north­ern and west­ern regions, while south­ern regions have lim­it­ed reserves. The largest fore­cast­ed ground­wa­ter resources are in the Cherni­hiv region (8,326.7 thou­sand m³/day), while the small­est are in the Kirovohrad region (404.6 thou­sand m³/day). The high­est lev­el of explo­ration of fore­cast­ed ground­wa­ter resources (over 50%) is observed in the cen­tral and south­ern regions of Ukraine.

The aver­age annu­al extrac­tion of drink­ing and tech­ni­cal ground­wa­ter in Ukraine is only about 5% of total fore­cast­ed resources and about 10% of explored exploitable reserves. In recent years, a steady decline in ground­wa­ter extrac­tion has been observed.

It should be not­ed that while many explored deposits are not in use, some have already become unsuit­able for exploita­tion due to dis­rupt­ed recharge con­di­tions caused by urban devel­op­ment; con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of aquifers with­in recla­ma­tion sys­tems, areas of fil­tra­tion reser­voirs, indus­tri­al waste dumps, and land­fills; and extrac­tion of grav­el and peb­ble deposits from Carpathi­an rivers. Cur­rent­ly, hun­dreds of water intake sys­tems in Ukraine oper­ate on explored ground­wa­ter reserves, where water qual­i­ty has dete­ri­o­rat­ed over time due to both nat­ur­al and anthro­pogenic fac­tors. The issue of pro­vid­ing high-qual­i­ty drink­ing water is par­tic­u­lar­ly acute in the south­ern and east­ern regions of the coun­try, as well as in min­ing and indus­tri­al areas (Odessa, Myko­laiv, Kher­son, Zapor­izhzhia regions, the tem­porar­i­ly occu­pied Autonomous Repub­lic of Crimea, Donet­sk Basin, Kryvyi Rih Basin, and the Carpathi­an region, etc.).

All of this cre­ates the need for geo­log­i­cal explo­ration of drink­ing ground­wa­ter and drilling arte­sian wells to ensure the pop­u­la­tion of Ukraine with envi­ron­men­tal­ly safe drink­ing water. Con­sid­er­ing Ukraine’s tran­si­tion to a mar­ket econ­o­my and decen­tral­iza­tion pol­i­cy, financ­ing of such works will main­ly come from local bud­gets and pri­vate investors.

Increas­ing ground­wa­ter extrac­tion for drink­ing water sup­ply will sup­port the imple­men­ta­tion of nation­al water pol­i­cy prin­ci­ples, includ­ing align­ing nation­al drink­ing water stan­dards with those of the Euro­pean Union and main­tain­ing an opti­mal bal­ance between sur­face and ground­wa­ter use for water sup­ply.

The Insti­tute of Geol­o­gy pro­vides full sup­port for sub­soil use and water use on a turnkey basis!