What is it about?
The Axarquía region in southern Spain underwent a severe water crisis in 2019-2024 that caused the near-depletion of its large reservoir, a drop in groundwater levels to sea-level in many parts of the main aquifer, and large socio-economic impacts. It is important to examine such crises as the result of human-environment interactions and not merely from a hydrological perspective. In this work, we have analyzed meteorological and hydrological data as well as water management plans spanning over two decades, land and water regulations, other documents such as newspaper articles, and local water management institutions to understand the combined causes of the crisis. This helps us identify possible measures to prevent such crises in similar water scarce regions.
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Why is it important?
Our findings show that the Axarquía water crisis was caused by a confluence of shorter and long-term dynamics. An unusually severe multi-year meteorological drought directly impacted reservoir and aquifer levels. At the same time, water demand for irrigation has increased over the last two decades because of expanding irrigated avocado and mango plantations. Water management shows significant shortcomings, including large uncertainties surrounding actual water use and availability, lack of extraction metering, permit overallocation, and likely a significant amount of irregular groundwater extraction. Our main conclusion is that water management must go beyond traditional supply-side (increase water availability) and demand-side (increase efficiency) measures and impose stricter limits on demand (e.g., through caps on irrigated area) combined with a more accurate assessment of water availability (improved models and monitoring) and use (real-time metering at all extraction points), flexible permits adjusted based on available water resources, and effective enforcement.
Perspectives
Water crises and other extreme events (such as floods, wildfires, famines, etc.) are almost always the combined result of human–environment interactions and responses. This makes it important to analyze them from a multidisciplinary perspective. The challenge of such an analysis, especially when it aims to tell the story of what happened and why, is that it is difficult to know a priori what variables are relevant among the many processes involved. For this work, we gathered a large amount of data for our spatial-temporal and document analysis. The processes of gathering and analyzing data were iterative, as new insights generated new lines of investigation. As a result, this work took us several years, but we hope that the results and suggestions are well-balanced.
Victoria Junquera
Universitat Bern
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Severe water crisis in southern Spain under expanding irrigated agriculture: A multidimensional drought analysis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2508055122.
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