Groundwater in hard rocks of Benin: Regional storage and buffer capacity in the face of change

Groundwater plays a major role in supplying domestic water to millions of people in Africa. In the future, the ability to increase reliable water supplies for domestic and possibly irrigation purposes will depend on groundwater development. Groundwater storage is a key property because it controls the buffering behavior of the aquifer as it is subjected to time-varying conditions such as increased pumping or land-use change. However, quantitative knowledge of groundwater storage in Africa is very limited. This lack of knowledge is a major concern in hard rocks, which cover about 40% of the surface area of Africa. This paper presents a unique quantitative assessment of groundwater storage in different types of hard rocks and a first estimate of the capacity of hard rock aquifers to buffer changes in climatic and anthropogenic conditions. Our study area in Benin (West Africa) is composed of various grades of metamorphic rocks. We used the latest developments in the application of the magnetic resonance geophysical method to confront the methodological difficulty of quantifying groundwater storage. We successfully conducted 38 magnetic-resonance measurements in eight (8) different geological units; each measurement was quantitatively interpreted in terms of groundwater storage. We determined the groundwater storage of our study area to be 440 mm 70 mm (equivalent water thickness). To assess the buffer capacity of aquifers, we compared groundwater storage to groundwater discharge. Groundwater discharge is the sum of natural discharge plus human abstraction. We estimated natural discharge (i.e. deep drainage plus evapotranspiration) from water table fluctuations monitored in six (6) piezometers. Human abstraction was calculated based on the number of operating boreholes and their average daily abstraction. We found that human abstraction (0.34 mm/year +/- 0.07 mm) is far less than natural discharge (108 mm/ year 58 mm). We conclude that increased abstraction due to population growth will probably have a smaller impact on storage than observed land-use change, which may lead to a change in the evapotranspiration rate. We calculated buffer capacity as the ratio of current storage to total discharge, and obtained a result of 6 years +/- 47 months. This buffer capacity confirms groundwater's ability to buffer changes. Finally, our study is intended to promote a more quantitative approach to assessing groundwater resources in Africa and to support our ability to adapt to current and future changes. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.