Abstract
The conflict of the human-water relationships (HWR) has further increased the water-related risks, such as water environment deterioration, water shortages, and even regional violent conflicts for obtaining usable water resources. Knowing how to evaluate and regulate the discordant HWR to form a balanced growth between sustainable socio-economy and water resources protection has become a critical issue in water resources management. The harmony theory method, which provides a new perspective for solving the conflict between humans and water, has been widely used in current studies. However, this method focuses less on the quantitative study of the balance status of HWR. This study proposes a harmony theory-based HWR evaluation method that contains a systematic process of harmony assessment, indicator identification, harmony balance constraints, and harmony regulation for assessing and regulating the discordant HWR. The Henan Province of China, which has a complicated HWR, was selected as a case study to apply and verify the approach proposed in this study. The results indicated that (1) Henan Province showed a poor harmony status. The human–water harmony degree of 18 distinctions in the province varied from 0.41 to 0.76, showing an increasing trend from 2006 to 2018, indicating that the HWR was gradually improving in recent years. (2) The human–water harmony degree showed that HWR in the southwest part of Henan Province, with less human activities, was better than that in its northeast part, which had faster social development. Sanmenxia City, located in the west part of the province, had the highest human–water harmony degree because of the recent water control projects implemented in the city, indicating that human production measures could effectively help improve HWR. (3) At present, Henan Province has serious discordant indicators in these three aspects (water system health, humanistic system development, and human-water system coordination), which proves that it is still facing pressure from both socio-economy sustainable development and water resources protection. Our results provide insight into water resources management in Henan Province and other similar regions.
Highlights
Water resources are a vital substrate and precondition to human development and ecoenvironmental protection [1]
We propose a harmony-based approach that contains a systematic process of the harmony assessment, indicator identification, harmony balance constraints, and harmony regulation for assessing and regulating the discordant human-water relationships (HWR)
We considered that the harmony of HWR was mainly determined by whether the harmony degree of HWR met the minimum harmonious balance threshold constraint
Summary
Water resources are a vital substrate and precondition to human development and ecoenvironmental protection [1]. Due to rapid increase of population, widespread economic growth, rapid urbanization and industrialization, low efficiency of water consumption, improper water management and insufficient water storage infrastructure [2], the human-water relationships (HWR) in many regions over the globe is facing and will continue face severe disharmony [3,4,5,6,7,8]. The serious human-water contradiction has posed a great challenge to water resources protection and socio-economic development. It is urgently needed to assess and regulate the disharmony HWR, realize a virtuous cycle of coordination between the humanistic system and the water system, that is, provide long-term support and guarantee for human survival and sustainable economic and social development under the premise of continuous improvement of the self-sustaining and renewal ability of the water system [10]
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