Virtual water indicator for comprehensive water pressures: Model and case studies

Abstract

Virtual scarce water (VSW) is an improved indicator of virtual water, enabling meaningful comparisons between water use of products from regions with different water resources and water scarcity. This study considers virtual water for comprehensive water pressures (VWCP) as an improvement to VSW, adding a more thorough consideration of available water resources, including the consideration of ecological water demand, like aesthetic water demand, shipping water demand, and unusable flood water. An input–output (IO) model is built to calculate the VWCP contained in the final product of industrial sectors. The Pearl River Basin (PRB) and Haihe River Basin (HRB) in China are used as study cases to evaluate the model. The results show that the pressure of water resource consumption in HRB has exceeded its carrying capacity, and the pressure of water resource consumption in the PRB, which is rich in water resources, is greater than current models report. These findings support the observations that VWCP can reveal more pressures of water resource usage than traditional VSW. Thus the new VWCP model can account for and improve environmental and social ethics in VW management and trading.