Feasible groundwater allocation scenarios for land subsidence area of Pingtung Plain, Taiwan

Land subsidence basically is the deprivation of water and earth resources, further inducing social and economical undesirable impact. The principal direction of land subsidence prevention is properly management of groundwater. However groundwater management should be developed on the basis of combined technical, economical, social and institutional approaches to management that reflect local conditions and can be adapted and evolved. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to make land subsidence prevention strategies for government to refer. Before year 1969, agriculture was the main land utilization business in Pingtung Plain. Due to intensive development of fish breeding after 1970’s, the aquaculture area along the estuary region of Pingtung Plain have been dramatically increased. Groundwater thus became the main fresh water resource for aquacultural water diluting and flushing because of the insufficiency in surface water supply. The uncontrolled development of groundwater resources has led to undesirable effects, especially in the south where aquaculture is concentrated. These effects are land subsidence, saline water intrusion, lowering of water tables and reductions in well yields. Government stressed on the improvement of breeding technology in the past, which mainly focused on the water quality control in order to raise the culture density, however, it neglected the impact to the environment and quantity control. This paper promotes a reasonable aquacultural water consumption policy aims at finding out the most suitable breeding species considering water consumption and its reasonable breeding area under the premise that it will not depress the original profit of aquatic products trading.