ABSTRACT
Large-scale land acquisitions or ‘land grabs’ have primarily focused on Africa. This chapter discusses the availability of groundwater in Africa using results from new research and mapping. It introduces some of the tools required sustainably to investigate and exploit the resource and the potential risks to groundwater and ecosystems from overuse and contamination of groundwater from intensive agriculture. The maps simplify the complexity and high variability in groundwater occurrence at catchment and local scales where groundwater will be exploited to sustain irrigation. The presented continental-scale maps provide a first indication of the distribution of groundwater resources across the African continent. As the world’s largest distributed store of freshwater, groundwater represents a potential source of water to enable the intensification of agriculture in Africa through irrigation. Fertiliser use and irrigation returns can degrade water quality by increasing nitrate concentrations and salinity.
