This report outlines the Water, Land and Ecosystem (WLE) conceptual understanding of groundwater-dependent and groundwater-impacting ecosystem services and devises an approach to guide research and policy development related to agrarian socio-ecologies highly dependent on groundwater.

It highlights an urgent need is to develop governance and management regimes that can balance the trade-offs between livelihood resilience and socio-economic development on the one hand and ecological resilience of groundwater-dependent agrarian landscapes on the other. It argues that it is of paramount importance that previous failures and shortcomings in governance of these types of systems be recognised and accounted for in timely and tailored governance paradigms in order to achieve longer-term sustainability and resilience of these socio-ecologies.

[Adapted from source]