Global and regional changes have significant financial, socio-economic and environmental impact on water resources. This is manifested in severe depletion of groundwater levels, salinisation of soils and aquifers, and increased water pollution levels. In many cases though, this can be compensated through carefully designed adaptation measures. One such example is represented by managed (artificial) aquifer recharge (MAR), method which implies the purposeful recharge of groundwater with surface water for subsequent recovery or environmental benefits. Over decades, MAR schemes were successfully installed worldwide for a variety of reasons: to maximize the natural storage capac- ity of aquifers (i.e., seasonal water storage), physical aquifer management (restoration of ground- water levels in overexploited aquifers, reduction of land subsidence and prevention of saltwater intrusion), water quality management (improvement of water quality through soil percolation), ecological benefits (such as maintaining the groundwater levels and flow requirements) and other benefits (such as saving on evaporation, storage of reclaimed water, etc.). The economic feasibility of MAR schemes increases for projects with high-value uses such as potable supply while the projects with low-value uses such as irrigation are usually characterized by low capital and operating costs. To emphasize the important role of MAR in the mitigation of global change impacts, the first part of this presentation brings evidence collected from over 1,200 MAR case studies from 60 countries, including data on historical development, site characterisation, operational scheme, objectives and recharge methods used, as well as quantitative and qualitative characterisation of both influent and effluent. In the second part, the talk will include also an overview on different planning and optimi- sation approaches with special emphasis on the newly developed web-based groundwater modeling platform for MAR applications (the INOWAS platform). The core of the system is represented by a compilation of public domain models of different levels of complexity ported on a web server for best data accessibility. The INOWAS framework presented includes several advantages over con- ventional simulation approaches: (a) allows the use of various model complexities; (b) provides best accessibility of project data and multi-institutional collaboration through web-based implementa- tion; (c) makes use of a combination of widely available open-source tools; and (d) promotes the case-based reasoning approach as additional support for parameter estimation and solution finding. Overall, the paper emphasizes the relevance of MAR for groundwater replenishment around the world with specific focus on the Arabian Gulf Region and introduces new tools aimed at boosting the uptake of MAR in the near future.