Children draw clean water from a borehole in northern Mozambique. Credit: Jake Lyell/Alamy Stock Photo.
— The findings come from the first assessment of how long it could take groundwater to react to the impacts of climate change in different parts of the world.
On the map, which is shown below, yellow shows areas where groundwater is likely to fully respond to stresses in less than 10 years, light green shows where the response time is 10-100 years, while dark green and blue indicate response times of 100 to more than 10,000 years.