It should be noted that available statistics do not in practice rigorously follow consistent water use class definition criteria. Rather, they follow the main targets of the groundwater withdrawal provisions, which means that rural drinking water supplied by irrigation wells may be included in "irrigation use" statistics, whereas water from public water supplies but used for small-scale irrigation or for small business or industrial uses may be included under "domestic use". Data on the break-down of groundwater abstraction with respect to water use sectors are much scarcer than data on total abstraction, and time series are virtually non-existent. In view of this, as a first approximation, it is assumed that the breakdown over the water use sectors does not vary much in time, hence even data of ten years earlier could still be representative for 2010.