Il seminario, dal titolo "GrounDwater sAlinizaTion and pollution AsseSsmEnt: insight from the DATASET project" sarà tenuto dal Prof. Gianluigi Busico, Università della Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli"

Object: Seminar on groundwater vulnerability.
Coastal areas are invaluable ecosystems with pivotal resources for economic and societal development. Salinization processes (SP) of freshwater resources from both natural and anthropogenic sources are the most alarming and widespread issues in coastal areas, in Europe and worldwide. The increasing urban sprawl triggered radical changes in coastal environments, generating a severe demand for natural resources, exacerbated by a lack of planning and management. This, together with intensive agricultural practices typical of fertile coastal plains, generates relevant water resources stress which often leads to groundwater pollution. Agricultural leaching (AGL) is one of the major water pollution components, due to the increasing demand for food supply. SP and AGL coexist in many low-lying areas around the world like delta areas, where a persistent and ubiquitous interconnection between surface and groundwater bodies is present. To face water resources deterioration due to SP and AGL, along with the associated economic and social losses, a growing number of policies and actions have been devised both at European and global level. In the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) N°6 and N°13 are dedicated to water availability and quality and to CC impacts, respectively. In this framework, assessing aquifer vulnerability to AGL and SP represents an essential preventive tool in terms of screening sustainable management of groundwater resources. Accordingly, the use of groundwater vulnerability assessment (GVA) and specifically of rating methodologies has increased in response to the increasing reporting of SP and AGL phenomena. Rating methods can be simply implemented in GIS-environment and are often scalable also to large domains (regional and national) via free open- databases realized at global scale. On the other hand, rating methods are static, often influenced by subjectivity and sometimes overlooking important parameters.

Aims of the seminar.
The main goal of the seminar is to discuss in detail all the advantages and disadvantages of GVA methods, focusing on parameters selection and weights assignment, to give a general overview of all currently available methodologies. Moreover, part of the seminar will focus on the presentation of a new rating method tailored to evaluate groundwater vulnerability in coastal areas.