Regional water system vulnerability evaluation: A bi-level DEA with multi-followers approach

Abstract

Evaluating water system vulnerability is the first priority in water security management, which is defined as measuring the degree of harm from exposure to stresses and the susceptibility and resilience of the system to human activities and natural causes. As a means of comprehensively exploring such weaknesses and susceptibilities in the interest of future development, this paper proposes a vulnerability evaluation framework that integrates Bi-level Programming (BLP) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with multi-followers: the water authority as the leader and industrial, domestic and agricultural water users as the multiple followers. A case study of 19 regions in the Yangtze River Basin between 2013 and 2017 is then introduced to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed bi-level DEA model. It was found that water systems were vulnerable to damage by hazards, that the domestic sector had the greatest effect on the whole, and the proposed framework identifying more vulnerable and safer areas provided managerial insights. The novelty of this paper is to put forward the vulnerability assessment framework of the regional water system which integrates water quantity, contamination, water-related hazards and water use efficiency and reveals the structure of realistic water resource management to obtain more sensitive results.