This paper in Water Resources Research is about global groundwater depletion and pollution, and how groundwater can be managed better.

With rivers in critical regions already exploited to capacity throughout the world and groundwater overdraft as well as large-scale contamination occurring in many areas, we have entered an era in which multiple simultaneous stresses will drive water management. Increasingly, groundwater resources are taking a more prominent role in providing freshwater supplies. We discuss the competing fresh groundwater needs for human consumption, food production, energy, and the environment, as well as physical hazards, and conflicts due to transboundary overexploitation. During the past 50 years, groundwater management modeling has focused on combining simulation with optimization methods to inspect important problems ranging from contaminant remediation to agricultural irrigation management. The compound challenges now faced by water planners require a new generation of aquifer management models that address the broad impacts of global change on aquifer storage and depletion trajectory management, land subsidence, groundwater-dependent ecosystems, seawater intrusion, anthropogenic and geogenic contamination, supply vulnerability, and long-term sustainability. The scope of research efforts is only beginning to address complex interactions using multi-agent system models that are not readily formulated as optimization problems and that consider a suite of human behavioral responses.

They get something important right here, which is that if you are formulating a question in a way that the answer can be “optimized”, you have probably defined the question much too narrowly. Water resources are one part of much larger complex natural and social systems. Modeling and technical analysis is important to pare the universe of all possible decisions down to a smaller set where each possible decision is close to “optimal” or efficient in the technical and economic senses. But then this information needs to be fed into a stakeholder or political process where a much wider range of factors can be considered and decisions made.

I am concerned that the current laser focus on “science, technology, engineering, and math” in education is pushing people too far down the path of expecting clear-cut technocratic answers to questions that have messy political and cultural dimensions in reality. All these subjects are good to study, but they need to pared with solid education in planning processes and tools, and an appreciation of systems in general.