A Water Resource Allocation Model Based on Coupled Socio-economic-Environment-Ecology-Resources System

Abstract

With the ongoing economic development and population growth, the shortage of water resources has become a severe problem which involves conflicts and tradeoffs among society, economy, environment, and ecology. Although previous researches proposed multi-objective optimization models, human-water coupled models, and hydro-economic models to deal with these conflicts and tradeoffs, they still did not address water demands’ integration and lacked future vision of water resource allocation. This paper proposed a Water Resource Allocation Model based on coupled Socio-economic-Environment-Ecology-Resources System (WRAM-SEERS) which considered integrally optimization objectives of socio-economic, environmental, and ecological subsystems under the constraints of water and land resources. The proposed model has the following advantages: (a) It could reflect all the closely related elements of the evolution of human society including urban and ecological space planning, cultivated structure and scale, population structure and size, industrial structure and scale, and so on, (b) It could generate the Pareto frontier surface, which maximized the socio-economic interest while minimizing the adverse externalities reacting in environment and ecology, and (c) It could forecast the future development range of each subsystem under hydrologic uncertainties. We applied WRAM-SEERS to allocate water resources of Yinchuan City in China in 2021-2035 and explained issues related the future perspective of Yinchuan: (a) “what is the lower and upper limits of subsystems’ development targets”, (b) “how to set targets consistent with sustainable development”, and (c) “how to achieve the settled targets”. The above explanations provided a scientific basis and decision-making reference for improving the water safety guarantee ability of Yinchuan's economic and social development and promoting a green, sustainable and high-quality development.