Abstract
For developing countries, an adequate domestic water supply is conventionally assessed based on the proportion of communities that are covered by improved water sources. However, it is difficult to evaluate water poverty accurately, as it is multidimensional. For this reason, this paper used the Water Poverty Index (WPI) to measure water poverty in rural communities of arid areas in China. This study also uses the Least Square Error (LSE) model to analyze the influencing factors of water poverty. Based on the WPI and LSE, the results showed that the rural communities of Sheshu, Fanyao, Dongcao, Qiaodi, and Gouershang (listed in order of priority of need for intervention) are in a water poverty situation. In rural communities with high water poverty, the suggested priority order for the study was environment, capacity, use, resources, and access, with the environmental factor needing to be improved. The results are useful for prioritizing areas and identifying the extent of the need for policy intervention on different scales. The research findings are intended to complement the evaluation of water poverty and to provide a strategy for regional water resources management to relieve water poverty.
Highlights
Water, a basic human resource, is indispensable to human life and economic development [1].According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and a third of the world population faces water shortages [2]
The Water Poverty Index (WPI) values have many implications for water resource planning, management, and research. They help improve the situation of shortage in water resources on every scale, but may lead to inefficient investment and limit their own conditions, and in addition may give preferential policy to some areas where levels of socio-economic conditions and resource availability may result in failure towards alleviating water poverty [40]
The component values help to prioritize a focus area in the relevant study area, as well as to monitor the degree of shortage in water resources to be improved in the specific focus areas
Summary
A basic human resource, is indispensable to human life and economic development [1].According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and a third of the world population faces water shortages [2]. A basic human resource, is indispensable to human life and economic development [1]. In the twenty-first century, water shortages are likely to exceed the amount necessary for farmland, which is one of the important factors restricting the development of agriculture, endangering economic growth. The first is traditional water shortage, which refers to the lack of available water in nature and describes water quality as well as the spatial-temporal distribution of water resources that cannot meet the needs of production, life, and ecological systems [3]. The second is to consider the dominance of human activities, and to expand water resources into the socio-economic sphere: some people lack the ability or right to access water [4]. Water resource shortages have been testified as having impacts on health, education, land, gender, social inclusion, and income/consumption [5] in many developing countries, on urban [6], rural [7,8], and basin [9,10] scales
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