Iran has experienced much the same fate with its groundwater resources.
It is a crisis that has a sad origin, they say: the destruction and abandonment of tens of thousands of ancient tunnels for sustainably tapping underground water, known as qanats, that were once the envy of the arid world. But calls for the Iranian government to restore qanats and recharge the underground water reserves that once sustained them are falling on deaf ears.
After a fifth year of extreme drought, Iran’s long-running water crisis reached unprecedented levels in November. The country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, warned that Iran had “no choice” but to move its capital away from arid Tehran, which now has a population of about 10 million, to wetter coastal regions — a project that would take decades and has a price estimated by analysts at potentially $100 billion.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/iran-water-drought-dams-qanats
Mexico City is also experiencing a similar thing but forced on it by Europeans into a feedback cycle.
In the 1520s, after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, efforts to control flooding in the lacustrine flatlands led to progressive drainage of the lake through canals and dikes. In 1900, the valley of Mexico was entirely drained artificially by the means of a 40 km-long canal to the Northeast of the basin and a tunnel through the mountains. Nowadays, sewage and stormwater are pumped out of the basin through a large canal and tunnel system, while 30% of the city's drinking water is imported through a similar network. The remaining 70% of the city's drinking water comes from groundwater extraction from wells located throughout the basin with an average depth of 600 m and a maximum depth of 3,000 m. The overexploitation of the aquifer system is causing severe land subsidence in the ZMVM, which has been recognized since the early 1900s (Gayol, 1929). Subsidence exacerbates the risk of flooding and damages both the water distribution infrastructure and sewage networks, causing leakage and contamination. As a result, access to drinking water is a major factor in urban segregation of wealth and results in substandard living conditions.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020JB020648
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/67776
Around a quarter of the U.S. food supply is grown in California's Central Valley. Most of its crops, like rice, fruit trees and nut trees, are water-intensive and require extensive groundwater pumping during droughts. Over time, heavy water extraction has contributed to changes in the aquifer systems under the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys. Although some of these changes can be reversed, a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that large parts of the Sacramento Valley may have undergone irreversible ground compaction during recent droughts, leading to a permanent loss of groundwater storage.
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A small and noble sacrifice that Californians are more than willing to make so a few billionaires can turn a profit from growing almonds and pomegranates........
Before it was merely a resource to be exploited and now!