Comprehensive Carrying Capacity Assessment of Water Environment in Zhengzhou City

Abstract

At present, research on water environmental carrying capacity (WECC) at home and abroad mainly focuses on surface water carrying capacity and ignores groundwater pollution receiving capacity,which leads to the research results cannot objectively reflect the actual situation. This paper treated both surface water and groundwater as a whole research object; used analytic hierarchy process (AHP); selected surface water environmental capacity and groundwater pollution receiving capacity as the first level indicators; built the scoring system and weight system; and accomplished comprehensive carrying capacity assessment of water environment in Zhengzhou city. Assessment result shows that very low WECC zone reduces by 5.1 times, low WECC zone reduces by 1.1 times, medium WECC zone increases by 2.6 times, and very high WECC zone increases by 1.5 times compared with the result which considers surface water only. Therefore, treating both surface water and groundwater as a whole to evaluate the WECC is more in line with objective reality. It is also conducive to water environmental protection policy formulation.

An Integrated Method for Accounting for Water Environmental Capacity of the River–Reservoir Combination System

“…Generally, the calculation of WEC can provide a scientific basis for water pollution control as it provides a baseline for the total pollutant reduction needed. Previous studies mainly focused on various methods of calculating WEC [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], including analytical methods, dynamic mechanism model methods, and the calculation of the water environment capacity in a specific area [11,14,16,[19][20][21][22][23]. Most case studies mainly use a river [12,15,16,19,23], lake, and reservoir [6,14,20,22] as objects in China, but there has been less research on the WEC of a certain river-reservoir combination system.…”