Algeria's per capita water availability is less than 300 cubic meters per year, which is well below the threshold for the U.N. definition of water poverty. Many citizens simply do not have daily access to running water. The country's water is also unevenly distributed , with most of its surface water resources concentrated in the north, along with the bulk of its population. There is water in the sparsely populated central and southern parts of the country, but it is primarily groundwater — and it is at risk. Not only are the aquifers beneath Algeria's desert very slow to recharge, the non-renewable water drawn from them is sometimes called fossil water because it has sat undisturbed in the aquifers for millennia. Algerian groundwater withdrawals are roughly double the annual recharge rate, and the problem is spreading: Even aquifers farther north are showing signs of diminishing quantity and quality.