Abstract
Water scarcity has seriously threatened the sustainable development of Zhangjiakou City, an arid agricultural area in North China, and the ecological security of its neighboring areas. In this study, a system dynamics model is established based on variable sensitivity analysis and is employed to simulate water demand (2015–2035) in four designed alternative development scenarios in Zhangjiakou City. The results show that: (1) the variables related to irrigation farmland are the main driving factors of water demand, especially the area and water use quota. (2) The total water demand will rise continually in the current development scenario and economic priority scenario, and the proportion of agricultural water demand will drop to 67% and 63%, respectively. It will decline continually in the water-saving priority scenario and balanced development scenario, and the proportion of agricultural water demand will drop to 56% and 57%, respectively. (3) Water consumption per ten thousand yuan of GDP will fall to around 20 m3 in 2035 in each scenario, indicating that the reduction of water demand only by slowing down economic growth cannot improve the efficiency of water use. The research results will be beneficial to extract feasible strategies and policies for balancing economic development and water conservation.
Highlights
The relationships between human and natural systems are bi-directional [1]
(2) The total water demand will rise continually in the current development scenario and economic priority scenario, and the proportion of agricultural water demand will drop to 67% and 63%, respectively
It will decline continually in the water-saving priority scenario and balanced development scenario, and the proportion of agricultural water demand will drop to 56% and 57%, respectively
Summary
The relationships between human and natural systems are bi-directional [1]. The impact of human activities on natural systems is changing the way we view and manage the earth’s resources [2,3]. With the challenges of population expansion, rapid urbanization, and climate change, water resources, as irreplaceable resources for human-nature systems, are becoming increasingly scarce [4]. This will significantly affect regional sustainable development and poses a serious threat to the well-being of future generations [5,6,7]. WPI, first used by Sullivan [16], is measured using five components “resources”, “access”, “capacity”, “use”, and “environment” It has been widely used as a holistic tool to assess water resources available at different scales from countries [17,18,19] to districts and basins [20,21]. A number of studies have been carried out in this aspect, especially in areas where there is a negative gap between water supply and water demand [24,25,26]
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