Abstract
The Huang-Huai-Hai River Basin plays an important strategic role in China’s economic development, but severe water resources problems restrict the development of the three basins. Most of the existing research is focused on the trends of single hydrological and meteorological indicators. However, there is a lack of research on the cause analysis and scenario prediction of water resources vulnerability (WRV) in the three basins, which is the very important foundation for the management of water resources. First of all, based on the analysis of the causes of water resources vulnerability, this article set up the evaluation index system of water resource vulnerability from three aspects: water quantity, water quality and disaster. Then, we use the Improved Blind Deletion Rough Set (IBDRS) method to reduce the dimension of the index system, and we reduce the original 24 indexes to 12 evaluation indexes. Third, by comparing the accuracy of random forest (RF) and artificial neural network (ANN) models, we use the RF model with high fitting accuracy as the evaluation and prediction model. Finally, we use 12 evaluation indexes and an RF model to analyze the trend and causes of water resources vulnerability in three basins during 2000–2015, and further predict the scenarios in 2020 and 2030. The results show that the vulnerability level of water resources in the three basins has been improved during 2000–2015, and the three river basins should follow the development of scenario 1 to ensure the safety of water resources. The research proved that the combination of IBDRS and an RF model is a very effective method to evaluate and forecast the vulnerability of water resources in the Huang-Huai-Hai River Basin.
Highlights
Water resource is widely regarded as among the most important elements to sustain both ecosystems and the economy [1]
Our preliminary analysis has shown that some variables are highly correlated with others, which enables us to use the dimension reduction approach aiming at saving computational power while maintaining prediction performance
The Improved Blind Deletion Rough Set (IBDRS) method is used to reduce the dimension of the index, and the reduced dimension index has the same evaluation ability as the original index
Summary
Water resource is widely regarded as among the most important elements to sustain both ecosystems and the economy [1]. Entropy 2020, 22, 333 due to flood disaster, water shortage, and water pollution, many Chinese river basins are showing varying degrees of water resource system vulnerability. It is of great importance for Chinese major river basins to evaluate the water resource vulnerability and reveal the causes [2]. The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pointed out that climate change, population growth, and economic activities all aggravate the adverse impact on water resources systems [3]. Forecasting future water resources vulnerability under the dual influence of human activities and climate change would help policymakers formulate the water resources management strategy in response to future changes in both humanity and climate dimensions.
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