Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Water abstraction is the process of taking water from the environment for irrigation or treatment to produce drinking water. Depending on the environmental legislation in the relevant country, controls may be placed on abstraction to limit the amount of water that can be removed. Over abstraction can lead to rivers drying up or the level of groundwater aquifers reducing unacceptably. The science of hydrogeology is used to assess safe abstraction levels. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.