Abstract
Assessing water resources vulnerability is the foundation of local water resources management. However, as one of the major water systems in China, there is no existing evaluation index system that can effectively assess water resource vulnerability for the Huai River basin. To address this issue, we identified key vulnerability factors, constructed an evaluation index system, and applied such system to evaluate water resources vulnerability for the Huai River basin empirically in this paper. Specifically, our evaluation index system consists of 18 indexes selected from three different aspects: water shortage, water pollution, and water-related natural disaster. Then, the improved blind deletion rough set method was used to reduce the size of the evaluation index while keep the evaluation power. In addition, the improved conditional information entropy rough set method was employed to calculate the weights of evaluation indexes. Based on the reduced index system and calculated weights, a rough set cloud model was applied to carry out the vulnerability evaluation. The empirical results show that the Huai River basin water resources were under severe vulnerability conditions for most of the time between 2000 and 2016, and the Most Stringent Water Resources Management System (MS-WRMS) established in 2012 did not work effectively as expected.
Highlights
Water is one of the most essential natural resources for a country because it is vital for all living creatures to survive
We collected evaluation index data for the Huai River basin water resources based on the research period between 2000 and 2016
This policy is supposed to generate a significant effect in the water resources vulnerability conditions in the Huai River basin, and should be incorporated in our research period to enable a test for its efficiency
Summary
Water is one of the most essential natural resources for a country because it is vital for all living creatures to survive. With a per capita water resource of merely a quarter of the global average, China is facing a serious water shortage problem, not to mention the extreme uneven temporal and spatial water distribution within the country. It is no exaggeration to say that the water systems of many river basins in China are vulnerable, though the reasons for those vulnerabilities vary. Vulnerability of basin water resources is an important frontier topic in the field of water resources research [1]. This type of study can measure the water resources vulnerability for a certain river basin quantitatively, and provide an objective angle to reflect the local water safety situation. There are many different reasons for the Entropy 2019, 21, 14; doi:10.3390/e21010014 www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy
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