Abstract
Understanding the changes in water consumption structure in order to take measures for demand control is very important for sustainable water resources management. In this study, using the Southern China area of Nanjing as an example, we employed the information entropy method to analyze the water consumption structure, as well as the grey incidence analysis to analyze synthetic incidence degree of the factors associated with agricultural, industrial, domestic, and ecological water consumption. The results show that the degree of balance among water consumption sectors has increased from 0.755 to 0.825 between 1993 and 2014. Gradual decrease of the relative proportion of a single water user structure in a water consumption system has made the utilization of water resources in Nanjing rational and diversified. The study identifies three stages of transformation of water structure in Nanjing, namely, a growth period from 1993 to 2002, an adjustment period from 2003 to 2010, and another growth period from 2011 to 2014. The synthetic incidence degree analysis indicates that adjustments of the agricultural and industrial water consumption as well as water saving measures are the main factors that affected water consumption structure in Nanjing. It is expected that the results obtained from this study will provide references to optimize the utilization of urban water resources.
Highlights
The shortage of water resources due to rapid economic development, population growth, urbanization and climate change have hindered future economic and social development in many countries [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Water consumption was analyzed for four main components introduced in Section 2: agricultural water (AW), industrial water (IW), domestic water (DW), and ecological water (EW) consumption
Coupled with statistical information, four main water consumption components could be subdivided into eight sectors, as follows: AW consumption comprising irrigation water (IRW) and forest, fishing, and stockbreeding water (FFSW) consumption; IW consumption comprising general IW (GIW) and electric power IW (EPIW) consumption; and DW consumption comprising urban DW (UDW), rural DW (RDW), and urban public water (UPW)
Summary
The shortage of water resources due to rapid economic development, population growth, urbanization and climate change have hindered future economic and social development in many countries [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Agricultural water (AW) consumption accounts for the largest proportion of total water consumption, but with population growth and economic development, industrial water (IW) and domestic water (DW) consumption have been growing rapidly in recent decades [7,8,9]. More and more researches showed that these changes are relevant to the climate, food demand, economic activity, irrigation methods, national income, conservation potential, and other factors. How to understand the changes of water consumption structure in order to adopt future demand reduction measures is a key research field during recent years [7,8,9,10].
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