Challenges for Water Security and Sustainable Socio-Economic Development: A Case Study of Industrial, Domestic Water Use and Pollution Management in Shandong, China

Abstract

Comprehensive analysis of water use and pollution management plays an important role in regional water security and sustainable socio-economic development. This study applies the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), Gini index and elasticity coefficient methods to conduct an investigation of industrial and domestic water use and pollution management in Shandong. The results show that industrial water pollution generally displayed a coordinated relationship with socio-economic development, while an uncoordinated relationship occurred between domestic water pollution and socio-economic development. Meanwhile, the Gini index between domestic water use and population in 2017 (0.101) was superior to that of 2003 (0.165), and the Gini index of industrial water use and second industry output in 2017 (0.273) was better than that of 2003 (0.292), indicating that the allocation and equity of domestic and industrial water use in Shandong kept to a good development trend. Additionally, the industrial effect is better than the domestic effect in terms of the control of wastewater emissions and the governance of typical pollutants in wastewater. Accordingly, domestic water pollution has gradually become one of the major sources of water pollution, and the allocation of industrial and domestic water use has room to improve further in Shandong. Conjunctive use of the aforementioned three methods provides an approach to investigate the integrated management of water use and water pollution control from multiple angles.

Assessment of Sustainable Socioeconomic Development in European Union Countries

“…Some scholars have investigated the link between social and economic development and water. For instance, Liu, Zhang, and Zhang (2019) [2] claim that there is a relationship between socioeconomic development and industrial and domestic water pollution, i.e., the availability of clean water is crucial [3]. There are also scholars analysing sustainable development from an organisational perspective [4,5].…”

Concentration of water use permit and volume-based fees in Ceará, Brazil

“…Various measures of concentration are developed in the literature in order to describe how the data of a variable are distributed within a set of individuals or elements, the Gini index being one of the most famous and frequently used, including by official institutions in Brazil and the world in order to measure inequality, for example, of income and land. Cullis & van Koppen (2007), Cole et al (2018), Liu et al (2019), and Kazemi et al (2020) applied this index in studies of water access/use concentration in many places around the world, and these kinds of studies have not been found in any Brazilian context.…”

“…To support the proposed questions, some hypotheses are used. First, that different use sectors must have different levels of concentration of access (permitting) to water (Cullis & van Koppen, 2007;Liu et al, 2019). Second, that increases in charging due to the incorporation of a new fee (in the case of this research, the permit fee) have different economic impacts to users (Aquino et al, 2013;Oliveira et al, 2017).…”

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“…According to the assessment results, water scarcity is the most prominent problem that restricts the improvement of HRI in Yellow River. Especially in Shandong, where the water resources are seriously short and uneven, the water resource per capita in Shandong is less than 1/6 of China's national average [63]. Besides, the utilization of water resources in agriculture within the upper reach is coarse with low efficiency, which would restrict the sustainable development seriously.…”