Spatial-temporal analysis of urban water resource vulnerability in China

Abstract

Because of urbanization and climate change, urban water environment faces a terrible vulnerability trend. This study aims to estimate the vulnerability of the urban water environment by quantifying the vulnerability indicators of urban water resources. This proposed indicator has two domains of development pressure and management capability. Four province-level municipalities, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing, and their neighboring provinces in China were selected as study sites. Regression analyses and vector autoregression models were conducted to study the temporal characteristics of the urban water vulnerability indicators. A comparison between the indicator values in the two domains distinguished three types of metropolises and revealed different levels of anthropogenic factors as the cause of water vulnerability. The combination of contemporaneous regression results and the Granger causality testing results using the vector autoregression models was used to identify different patterns of dependency between the metropolises and their neighboring provinces. Beijing and Tianjin have more obvious spatial -temporal relationships with neighborhood provinces.

Keywords

• Urban water resource vulnerability indicator
• Spatial–temporal analysis
• Vector autoregression model
• Metropolis
• China