Multi-scale water use balance for a typical coastal city in China

Abstract

Coastal cities play significant roles in the strategy of regional economic development as well as national water resource supply. As a typical coastal city in Hebei Province, China, Qinhuangdao is the main water supplier in Hebei Province but also faces increasingly scary water shortages at the same time. Taking Qinhuangdao as a case, this work analyzes the water supply and demand of a coastal city by multi-scale input-output analysis and conducts a comprehensive assessment on the water resource balance from the perspectives of global, domestic, provincial and municipal scales. Overall, the water use efficiency of Qinhuangdao is lower than that of Beijing but higher than China's average. Notice that, Qinhuangdao's local water resources only account for about 39.18% of its final water demand, which cannot fully satisfy its own demands. However, Qinhuangdao as a net embodied water exporting economy, has a total net export volume of 1.52E+08 m3 of embodied water. Especially, the secondary industry of Qinhuangdao has a great contribution to the provincial embodied water exports, while the primary industry is more essential in the domestic and foreign embodied water exports. From the global, domestic and provincial perspectives, the multi-scale supply chains of water resources at Qinhuangdao could provide a solid foundation for water allocation balance at different scales, which is necessary for regional water utilization and water saving policies from an embodied perspective.