Abstract
Humans’ activities in urban areas put a strain on local water resources. This paper introduces a method to accurately simulate the stress urban water demand in Germany puts on local resources on a single-building level, and scalable to regional levels without loss of detail. The method integrates building geometry, building physics, census, socio-economy and meteorological information to provide a general approach to assessing water demands that also overcome obstacles on data aggregation and processing imposed by data privacy guidelines. Three German counties were used as validation cases to prove the feasibility of the presented approach: on average, per capita water demand and aggregated water demand deviates by less than 7% from real demand data. Scenarios applied to a case region Ludwigsburg in Germany, which takes the increment of water price, aging of the population and the climate change into account, show that the residential water demand has the change of −2%, +7% and −0.4% respectively. The industrial water demand increases by 46% due to the development of economy indicated by GDP per capita. The rise of precipitation and temperature raise the water demand in non-residential buildings (excluding industry) of 1%.
Highlights
Water plays a fundamental role in sustaining human life and the Earth’s ecosystems
The result is based on the assumptions that (1) The total number of inhabitants is constant across these eight scenarios since the same CityGML file is given and the distribution function of occupant estimation algorithm is not changed; (2) the water demand pattern is based on the data collected in the past
Comparing scenarios 1–4 against scenarios 5–8 residential water demand in 2030 decreases by around 700 m3/a, or 0.4%, compared with demand based on the current climate
Summary
Water plays a fundamental role in sustaining human life and the Earth’s ecosystems. Almost 80% of the world’s population face a high-level threat of water security [1], and there is growing evidence that human activities are placing unsustainable stress on water resources. The water stress will increase between today and the 2050s in around 70% of the world’s river basins [2]. A precise modeling of urban water demands, covering residential and non-residential areas, can help local governments to better design local water supply infrastructures and improve management of local resource potentials. Water demand simulation is heavily focused on the residential sector with limited function on non-residential buildings. The simulation approach is usually top-down with aggregated occupant number and empirical water demand assumption.
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