Groundwater is an increasingly important resource for urban and rural potable water supply, irrigated agriculture, and industry, in addition to its natural environmental role of sustaining river flows and aquatic ecosystems. But major changes in land use that impact groundwater are taking place, as a consequence of population growth, increasing and changing food demands, and expanding biofuel cultivation. The link between land use and groundwater has long been recognised, but has not been widely translated into integrated policies and practices.

Policymakers and land managers around the world are struggling to use our finite land and resource base to increase agricultural production, ensure resilient ecosystems and improve livelihoods. Many are turning to integrated landscape management (ILM) as a framework for inter-sectoral planning and investments to reduce potential trade-offs and realize inherent synergies.

The first years of the twenty-first century will be remembered for a global land rush of nearly unprecedented scale. An estimated 500 million acres, an area eight times the size of Britain, was reported bought or leased across the developing world between 2000 and 2011, often at the expense of local food security and land rights. When the price of food spiked in 2008, pushing the number of hungry people in the world to over one billion, the interest of investors spiked as well, and within a year foreign land deals in the developing