We published the last book in the IAH, International Contributions to Hydrogeology Book Series, perhaps better known as our ‘Blue Books’. ‘Groundwater for Sustainable Livelihoods and Equitable Growth’ is a collection of nineteen situation reports from diverse human and physical settings within the overall theme of groundwater and sustainable livelihoods. It forms part of the mission of the IAH-Burdon Groundwater Network for International Development to create a groundwater knowledge base that will contribute to sustainable groundwater management and development in low-income countries.
We published further titles in the IAH Strategic Overview Series (IAH-SOS). ‘Poverty Reduction and Groundwater’, ‘Rural Water Supply and Groundwater’ and ‘Irrigated Agriculture and Groundwater’ Translations of several papers have been made to Chinese, French, Hindi, Portuguese and Spanish. We are grateful to IAH members who volunteered to help with these translations.
Our MAR Commission published a new book, ‘Managed Aquifer Recharge: Overview and Governance’, as an IAH Special Publication, which is downloadable free of charge. We hope this will be the first in a series of free books as part of our new Strategy. This book has been prepared jointly by IAH, UNESCO and NGWA with encouragement of the Ground Water Project.
IWA (International Water Association), a sister organisation to IAH, published a practical guidebook on ‘Groundwater assessment and Management for Water Utilities and Municipal Government’, with input from IAH’s Urban GW Network. Groundwater beneath cities is important and water utilities and private abstractors use is it as a secure source of water-supply but often pay little attention to groundwater once their wells are installed or subsurface construction is completed.
IAH signed Memorandum of Understanding with GroundwaterU, a not-for-profit educational and awareness-raising organisation. The MoU concerns the establishment of a comprehensive catalogue of high-quality educational videos related to groundwater, with content from around the globe and in multiple languages.
We were pleased to make available podcasts of two of the keynote presentations from last year’s congress in Belgium (transcripts also available): Jef Caers – Large-scale non-stationary geostatistical modelling in surface and subsurface hydrology Listen/read: https://bit.ly/3DJ2wTG David Kreamer – Groundwater in the field: Challenges, opportunities and possible solutions Listen/read: https://bit.ly/3JO1KqW