A pair of environmental scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that up to 20% of all the groundwater wells in the world are at risk of going dry in the near future. In their paper published in the journal Science, Scott Jasechko and Debra Perrone describe their analysis of groundwater well construction data from millions of wells around the world. James Famiglietti and Grant Ferguson with the University of Saskatchewan, have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal issue outlining the importance of groundwater management and the work done by the researchers on this new effort.