Abstract
Abstract. Decomposition analysis of water footprint (WF) changes, or assessing the changes in WF and identifying the contributions of factors leading to the changes, is important to water resource management. Instead of focusing on WF from the perspective of administrative regions, we built a framework in which the input-output (IO) model, the structural decomposition analysis (SDA) model and the generating regional IO tables (GRIT) method are combined to implement decomposition analysis for WF in a river basin. This framework is illustrated in the WF in Haihe River basin (HRB) from 2002 to 2007, which is a typical water-limited river basin. It shows that the total WF in the HRB increased from 4.3 × 1010 m3 in 2002 to 5.6 × 1010 m3 in 2007, and the agriculture sector makes the dominant contribution to the increase. Both the WF of domestic products (internal) and the WF of imported products (external) increased, and the proportion of external WF rose from 29.1 to 34.4%. The technological effect was the dominant contributor to offsetting the increase of WF. However, the growth of WF caused by the economic structural effect and the scale effect was greater, so the total WF increased. This study provides insights about water challenges in the HRB and proposes possible strategies for the future, and serves as a reference for WF management and policy-making in other water-limited river basins.
Highlights
A water footprint (WF) concept quantifies the water resource consumption of human beings (Yang and Zehnder, 2007)
The input-output (IO) and structural decomposition analysis (SDA) models are often used to quantitatively assess the WF changes between different years and the contributions of key economic sectors and factors leading to those changes, called the decomposition analysis of WF changes
Conventional studies only focus on WF from the perspective of administrative regions rather than from the perspective of river basins
Summary
A water footprint (WF) concept quantifies the water resource consumption of human beings (Yang and Zehnder, 2007). The WF of an economic sector identifies total water resource consumption in the production process (Hoekstra and Chapagain, 2007). It is important to assess yearly changes in the WF of a region, identify the key economic sectors and factors leading to the changes, and quantitatively evaluate the contributions of those sectors and factors to the changes so that policy-makers and management can take water-saving actions for the economic sector or factor with the largest contribution; this is called the decomposition analysis of WF changes (Hoekstra et al, 2011; Zhang et al, 2012). Leontief (1941) found that the input-output (IO) model could represent the monetary trade of intermediate products between different sectors in an economic system.
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