Over Fifty Years of Hydrogeological Practice and Geoethics: An Intergenerational View of a Changing World

Abstract

The exercise of professional hydrogeology is a privilege that requires sound scientific and technical knowledge, field training and interpersonal skills. A skilled hydrogeologist is required to have ethics, deontology, integrity, eco-responsibility, leadership, and behaviour but also the acceptance of the high-standards and codes of ethics and boundaries to avoid discrimination and harassment. In addition, the hydrogeology practice must encompass the geoethical approach. Water supply and infrastructure design and construction for groundwater monitoring are not popular nowadays around the scientific and technical community. However, thousands and thousands of wells and boreholes are drilled worldwide annually, without appropriate hydrogeological support. A professional hydrogeologist cannot support, for example, policies of abandon of fieldwork, leaving the aquifer exploitation restrained to high levels of management and governance. Those practices must be developed through proper conceptual site modelling based on field and laboratory data, complemented by GIS mapping, geovisualization techniques, numerical tools to predict scenarios and climate change understanding. On the ethical point of view, this systematic methodology underpins personal scientific integrity but also a comprehensive understanding of the problem to solve. That includes the moral decisions to be made regarding the undertake of the pure and applied hydrogeology in the practice, as well as the professional appropriate use of the scientific advancements in groundwater science, technology, and management.

Climate change and groundwater resources availability in the Great Limpopo National Park (Mozambique): the current state of knowledge

“…Several drivers stress that groundwater resources are susceptible to any change and, as a matter of fact, very vulnerable. Many rural villages rely entirely on groundwater abstraction for farming, irrigation and drinking water supply, domestic uses and groundwater for the bottling water industry (MacDonald et al 2008(MacDonald et al , 2009Farolfi and Gallego-Ayala 2013;Limaye 2017;Carvalho and Chaminé 2021;Andrei et al 2021) (Fig. 2).…”

“…More recently, emerged the concept of hydrogeoethics focussed on ethical research and best practices related to responsible groundwater science and engineering management and interrelated dimensions such as environmental law, social sciences, cultural and traditional values (Abrunhosa et al 2021). Carvalho and Chaminé (2021) also stated that this approach underlines personal scientific integrity and a comprehensive understanding of the problem to solve with an ethical approach. Additionaly, Linton and Budds (2014) point out the concept of the hydrosocial cycle as a socionatural process by which water and society are intrinsically overlapped over space and time to achieve a suitable for successfully sustainable water resources management.…”