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Solar-Powered Farming Is Quickly Depleting the World's Groundwater Supply
Farmers in hot, arid regions are turning to low-cost solar pumps to irrigate their fields, eliminating the need for expensive fossil fuels and boosting crop production. But by allowing them to pump throughout the day, the new technology is drying up aquifers around the globe.
Scott Jasechko, a hydrologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found water tables dropping by 3 feet or more every year in India, Iran, Afghanistan, Spain, Mexico, the United States, Chile, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. So, the arrival of stand-alone PV pumps is “a game-changer for small-scale farms” in sub-Saharan Africa, says Giacomo Falchetta, an energy and environment economist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. The solar-powered farms are pumping so hard that they have triggered “a significant drop in groundwater since 2018 … in spite of above average rainfall,” according to an analysis by Leonie Nimmo, a researcher who was until recently at the UK-based Conflict and Environment Observatory.
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