it may also reflect a low awareness about the role played by groundwater resources even though groundwater is locally very important in some areas in kazakhstan positively a comprehensive review of transboundary aquifers has been carried out the situation is particularly severe in afghanistan the central asian regional water information base project carewib database maintained by the scientific information centre of icwc is a recent effort to make information on water resources openly and readily accessible to all the countries in central asia even if access to this information system is differentiated among users with different levels of accessibility of data