By Anthony O. Miller
EXPERTS have issued warnings over the dire state of Cyprus’ underground water reserves, speaking of “catastrophic” consequences if we continue to pump from them at the current rate.
With reservoir levels running low and the island struggles through another year of drought, groundwater reserves are being increasingly tapped to make up for the shortfall — especially in the water-hungry agricultural sector.
“We are dangerously over-pumping our groundwater. We have passed beyond the danger point,” Geological Survey Department Director George Petrides warned yesterday.
“We cannot go on over-pumping, because reserves will run dry.”
“If we go back to 1960…there were about 3.2 billion cubic metres of groundwater stored in Cyprus,” Petrides said. “This was the period of the big boom in agricultural development, and the annual pumping in the mid-to- late 1960s was calculated to be 300 million cubic metres per year.”
Even that “was over-pumping, taking into account the annual recharge in that period of about 40 million cubic metres a year,” he said. Since then, things have changed for the worse.
Cyprus now only has about half — about 1.5 billion cubic metres — of that groundwater left. “But it’s not in a single cache. It’s scattered, which makes its recovery more difficult,” Petrides said.
As water tables fell with the farm boom, so did rainfall, which the Meteorological Service estimates has decreased about 17 per cent over the century. And with it, the aquifer-recharge rate fell about 30 per cent, Petrides said.
Cyprus now pumps some 240 million cubic metres of groundwater a year. But it only gets 210 million cubic metres to recharge its aquifers, leaving “an average of 30 million cubic metres per year in over-pumping,” Petrides said.
“That over-pumping could be catastrophic for the larger aquifers,” while the smaller ones will “simply reduce their yield so their bore-holes only pump out a few cubic metres per hour,” instead of the plentiful flow of years past, he said.
“For instance, boreholes in the Troodos that 25 years ago yielded 150 cubic metres an hour are now yielding two or three cubic metres an hour,” he said.
If over-pumping does not dry up the aquifers, “what will happen… is the yield of the boreholes will drop. It’s a law. The groundwater yield will go into a static mode and stay more or less balanced until replenished.”
“We’ve done the damage that could be done. From now on, it’s the quality rather than the quantity that is in danger in the groundwater,” Petrides said. “So we will be running another re-evaluation survey of the groundwater quality.”
Factors affecting aquifer quality include human pollution and salts from salt domes created by evaporated primordial seas, he said. This water has become brackish and tainted with boron, nitrates and fluoride. It is undrinkable and only “very rare strains of vegetables and plants can survive on it.”
But joint Cyprus-EU studies are seeking a cheap way to remove the contaminants from the salt-dome water, “in which case we have an extra source of groundwater,” Petrides said.
Petrides said the state could not bring private bore-hole pumping back under control.
“If we want to control it, we can,” he said. “In the old days, the main aquifers were declared as a special area. You needed not only a special permit, you needed extra controls on the pumping by meters at the outlet of the pump.
To prevent underground water running out Petrides has urged for the quick consolidation of control over the island’s water resources — rivers, dams, land use and crop irrigation — under a single authority, as the government has promised to do for more than a year.
Nicos Tsiourtis, Water Development Department (WDD) chief engineer, said 65 per cent of the island’s water was drawn from aquifers, and the rest from reservoirs and desalination.
Petrides noted that over 85 per cent of the groundwater pumped went to agriculture — often watering surplus crops that end up being dumped.
Responsibility for both groundwater and the growing of bumper crops comes under the authority of the Agriculture Ministry, which has been accused of failing to pursue a co-ordinated water-use and farm policy.
“I know there are steps being taken now to declare the whole of the island under the control of a Special Measures Law,” Petridesd said, adding this and the consolidation of all water powers under one authority would go far to conserving water.
“But time is closing in for things to happen, as a natural result of this over-exploitation,” he warned. “Desalination will give us breathing space, and if we use it correctly, it might enhance the groundwater reserves as well.”
