干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Groundwater pollution hazard is strongly related to the various human activities and water use whereby a number of pollutants may infiltrate down to the groundwater aquifers and become hazardous to human health. Therefore, there is a need to analyse the relationship between the current human activities, such as industrial, agricultural, landfills, sewerage network, and others that might have the potential for polluting groundwater and the areas that are classified as vulnerable to pollution in order to take the necessary precautions to protect groundwater resources from these activities. This study aims at contributing to groundwater protection, the only available natural water resource in the State of Kuwait, from potential surface pollution, by providing planners/water resources authority with planning documents in the form of maps and database that could be used in protecting the groundwater resources from surface pollution and by prohibiting possible future surface polluting activities or taking precautionary steps for the future ones. Landuse activities with pollution potential to groundwater as well as groundwater production fields were projected on the groundwater vulnerability map produced in the first part of this study, and the relationship between the two was analyzed. The analysis indicated that some agricultural activities and landfills are located in areas classified as moderately vulnerable, vulnerable and highly vulnerable to surface pollution. The study recommends that the results obtained in this study are verified by field investigation. Furthermore, the study recommends the use of modern irrigation techniques, the improvement in waste management, and the use of deep injection wells for the disposal of the oil-associated water as alternative to the currently practiced evaporation ponds.