Water Shortage Simulation Using a System Dynamics Approach: A Case Study of the Rafsanjan City

Abstract

Water shortage and its interconnected and integrated management is one of the life crises in recent years. Factors such as population growth, plurality of population needs, traditional farming methods, climate change, and water waste are among the contributing factors to this crisis. The complexity of water sources and consumption systems makes the management and decision-making related to this resource very difficult. This research aims to study the effective factors in the water sources and consumption system of Rafsanjan city and suggests a simulated model of water shortage and its causes. In this research, water shortage crises were simulated using system dynamics. Important variables of the water shortage crisis are identified and optimized using the Design of Experiments (DOE) method. Vensim software was considered to illustrate the simulations of five scenarios aiming at better managing water resources and dealing with the water shortage crisis in this city.

A New Socio-Hydrology System Based on System Dynamics and a SWAT-MODFLOW Coupling Model for Solving Water Resource Management in Nanchang City, China

“…Another system dynamics model can be created, encompassing population, water balance, groundwater, and surface runoff, to evaluate water resource carrying capacity by examining water resource gaps [8]. Water resource shortage crises and the sustainability of water resources can be simulated using system dynamics [9,10]. Therefore, system dynamics methods are widely used in socio-economic and water resources system studies, such as the water resource supply-demand ratio [11,12], water resource carrying capacity [13], water ecological carrying capacity [14,15], water environment [16], and water resource management [17][18][19].…”

The Driving Effects of the Total Water Use Evolution in China from 1965 to 2019

“…In recent years, water scarcity has become a major bottleneck constraining sustainable socio-economic development due to the uncontrolled exploitation of water resourses by human beings and changes in the climate [1,2]. In response to this problem, many countries have begun to pay attention to the prediction of future water demand, which is used to guide water resource planning and management to meet the challenges of sustainable water resource utilization [3,4].…”

“…The main contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) We studied the driving effects of the total water use evolution in China from the perspective of multi-year long timeseries in the whole country for the first time; this could comprehensively explain the influence mechanism of the total water use evolution in China and provide a complete research example for scholars studying related fields in other countries. Through the LMDI decomposition method, we constructed an LMDI decomposition model for the regional total water use evolution, and decomposed the total water use evolution in China and its five stages from 1965 to 2019 into the water use intensity effect (WUIE), sector proportion effect (SPE), per capita total economy effect (PCTEE), and total population effect (TPE).…”