City‐level water withdrawal in China: Accounting methodology and applications

Abstract

In the context of the freshwater crisis, accounting for water withdrawal could help planners better regulate water use in different sectors to combat water scarcity. However, the water withdrawal statistics in China are patchy, and the water data across all sectors at the city level appear to be relatively insufficient. Hence, we develop a general framework to, for the first time, estimate the water withdrawal of 58 economic-social-environmental sectors in cities in China. This methodology was applied because only inconsistent water statistics collected from different data sources at the city level are available. We applied it to 18 representative Chinese cities. Different from conventional perceptions that agriculture is usually the largest water user, industrial and household water withdrawal may also occupy the largest percentages in the water-use structure of some cities. The discrepancy among annual household water use per capita in the urban areas of different cities is relatively small (as is the case for rural areas), but that between urban and rural areas is large. As a result, increased attention should be paid to controlling industrial and urban household water use in particular cities. China should specifically prepare annual water accounts at the city level and establish a timetable to tackle water scarcity, which is a basic step toward efficient and sustainable water crisis mitigation.

City water stress and industrial water-saving potential in stringent management of China

“…We applied the general accounting framework used in previous work, and built up city-level and territory-based industrial water withdrawal data for individual sector and city, according to IPCC administrative boundary (scope 1) 49 . For method validation please refer to detailed discussion in previous paper 32 and Turner et al (2010) 50 . Of 343 cities, only 272 cities' data were available for sectoral accounting datasets, and 343 were further accounted for total blue-water withdrawal, availability and quantitative blue-water scarcity status.…”

“…Industrial sectors in 272 cities were investigated for two reasons: first, there were special regulations for industrial water withdrawal intensity in the redline policy; a number of cities were even required to implement the most up-to-date technologies or regulatory standards for water savings during industrial production. Second, the 41 industrial sectors we considered in total (see appendix III details) showed high heterogeneity in water use and saving potential 32 .…”

“…We first accounted for datasets on water withdrawal for 41 industrial sectors in 272 prefecture-level cities (88% of China's population), and water scarcity for all cities (343) in 2015, based on a pointsourced survey in China 31,32 . We identified cities suffering from water scarcity, and low water efficiency sectors at the city level (compared with the national average).…”

“…For key sectors and cities, our results help to identify priorities and optimize efforts for improving water use efficiency and facilitate more effective water management through enabling distinctive saving strategies. We built up datasets using a general accounting framework for Chinese cities, as developed for previous work 31,32 . Drawn on the datasets, Fig.…”

Water-saving co-benefits of CO2 reduction in China’s electricity sector

“…3 Meanwhile, the coal-based thermal power generation requires large volumes of water for cooling purposes in China. 4 , 5 , 6 The thermal power generation is thirsty for water, especially in the arid northwestern regions where large coal mines are located. 7 , 8 , 9 Water scarcity has become one of the important environmental constraints for deploying thermal power plants in catchments under high water stress.…”