Analysis and forecast of water supply and demand in beijing through system dynamics modeling

ABSTRACT

Beijing, the capital of China, has a fast-growing economy but is known for water scarcity. Therefore, relieving plans such as wastewater utilization and South-to-North-Transfer are implemented. Therefore, relationships are complicated among components in Beijing’s water supply-and-demand system. Maintaining the water balance in Beijing is crucial both economically and politically. However, few have directly addressed the problem systematically recently. Therefore, the system dynamics (SD) approach is applied for modeling of the water supply-and-demand system. The objective is to investigate and forecast water balance, and to identify and propose solutions for potential challenges. The SD approach is a popular computer-aided systematic method for investigating intricate behaviors of complicated systems. A serious water shortage in Beijing in a few years is forecast because current relieving plans will reach their limits. Restricting certain water demands and improving water reclamation is recommended. There is an urgent need to develop and implement sustainable methods for Beijing.

KEYWORDS:

• Water supply and demand balance
• system dynamics modeling
• water shortage
• Beijing
• forecast and sensitivity test

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M660666). This research was also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. U1509205 and No. U1709212. The authors would like to thank the research assistant Lijun Xie at Tsinghua University for her work in collecting the historical data. The authors acknowledge the hard work of the reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2019M660666] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [U1509205,U1709212].