A review of the managed aquifer recharge: Historical development, current situation and perspectives

The rising water demand worldwide caused by climate change, urbanization and population expansion, poses increasing stress on groundwater as a resource. Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) which is considered as one of the promising groundwater engineering approaches to water security especially in drought-occurring areas. As MAR techniques involve the intentional storage of water into an aquifer for subsequent recovery or for environmental benefits, considerable amount of research work in recent years has been carried out to alleviate the water crises as well as other related purposes. The objective of this paper is to present a review of MAR in terms of historical development, current situation and perspectives including demonstrating how promising the MAR is an approach. The review shows that the concept of MAR may have stemmed from early development of human society over two thousand years. The achievement of MAR is reviewed alongside its technologies, developed process for the implementation of MAR, as well as the applications in various fields. This review also identifies the common problems and challenges that render MAR's concept failure to be applicable in some settings. The reviewed literature has shown that MAR is expected to be increasingly applied in a wider range of scopes. Based on such conclusion, in this paper, it is recommended that further studies on MAR should focus on systematic clogging mechanism and prevention, the theory of seepage calculation, theory of infiltration for MAR, purification mechanism, and application of big data and artificial intelligence in MAR.