Climate change, particularly the resulting increase in episodes of drought, contributes to a scarcity of groundwater during the dry season, depriving communities and ecosystems of water resources.

Conversely, it can also contribute to an increase in precipitation, which brings about:

• saturation of wastewater recovery and treatment systems, thereby causing pollution to discharge into rivers and oceans;
• overflow of rivers, flooding;
• contamination of groundwater (from seawater in the event of a tsunami or chemicals in the event of run-off from illegal dumps);

For all those reasons, it is important to move potentially polluting activities away from sources of freshwater.