GROUNDWATER

Ruth Meinzen-Dick discusses how games could be used to help people cooperate to sustainably manage water, a classic common pool resource - in the Science's "Tragedy revisited", a new paper to mark the 50th anniversary of the famous essay by Garrett Hardin.

I grew up in Tamil Nadu, south India. It was a dry area, but a good well supplied our house and a few other houses around us. Then one year a farmer nearby installed a deeper well with an electric pump, and our well ran dry. That started a “race to the bottom”: As more and more farmers got pumpsets, the water table continued to fall and everyone had to deepen their wells to keep up.

A new multi-partner initiative aims to support and scale up practical solutions for groundwater management for sustainable development and food

In celebration of this year's World Water Day (March 22, 2014), this blog tells about the role of groundwater in food