Quantity and quality of China's water from demand perspectives

Abstract

China is confronted with an unprecedented water crisis regarding its quantity and quality. In this study, we quantified the dynamics of China's embodied water use and chemical oxygen demand (COD) discharge from 2010 to 2015. The analysis was conducted with the latest available water use data across sectors in primary, secondary and tertiary industries and input-output models. The results showed that (1) China's water crisis was alleviated under urbanisation. Urban consumption occupied the largest percentages (over 30%) of embodied water use and COD discharge, but embodied water intensities in urban consumption were far lower than those in rural consumption.(2) The 'new normal' phase witnessed the optimisation of China's water use structures. Embodied water use in light-manufacturing and tertiary sectors increased while those in heavy-manufacturing sectors (except chemicals and transport equipment) dropped.(3) Transformation of China's international market brought positive effects on its domestic water use. China's water use (116-80 billion tonnes (Bts)) 9 and COD discharge (3.95-2.22 million tonnes (Mts)) embodied in export tremendously decreased while its total export values (11-25 trillion CNY) soared. Furthermore, embodied water use and COD discharge in relatively low-end sectors, such as textile, started to transfer from international to domestic markets when a part of China's production activities had been relocated to other developing countries.

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

“…The water resource per capita in China is only one-quarter of the world average, and China is listed as one of the 13 water-scarce nations around the world (Chapagain & Hoekstra, 2008;Liu et al, 2017). Meanwhile, rapid economic growth in China has led to large amounts of water use, and China has become the largest water user (Piao et al, 2010), compounding the adverse impacts of water pollution on water resource availability (Liu et al, 2017;Li et al, 2019a). As a result, two-thirds of the cities in China suffer from freshwater scarcity (Qiao & Liu, 2014), and there are restrictions on the use of water by households and industries.…”

Multivariate Statistical Analysis for Water Quality Assessment: A Review of Research Published between 2001 and 2020

“…China's freshwater bodies account for nearly 7% of the world's total freshwater bodies, ranking sixth globally in terms of volume and with approximately one-third of lakes and rivers polluted to a level that renders their use inappropriate for human consumption. With approximately 18.5% of the world's population, China has faced an unprecedented water crisis in terms of quantity and quality [65,66]. Since 2001, great efforts have been made to assess water pollution in the country.…”