ABSTRACT
We used an adapted water resources ecological footprint model with two sub-models to assess water resources’ status and usage. One sub-model is the water consumption ecological footprint, encompassing household, productive, and ecological consumption. The other is the water pollution ecological footprint, analysing primary pollution indicators: chemical oxygen demand and ammonia nitrogen. Results revealed that 89% of the total water resources ecological footprint was attributed to consumption, whereas only 11% was due to pollution. We found a gradual increase in the water resources ecological footprint from 2010 to 2020, with Xi’an consistently exhibiting the highest value. Despite a slight reduction in water resources ecological pressure due to new environmental policies, the carrying capacity declined annually. Encouragingly, there was a noticeable improvement in water use efficiency. This study advances theory and implementation of water resources ecological footprint, and elucidates the interrelationship among economic development, water resource pressure, and utilization.
Editor A. Castellarin; Associate Editor E. Hassanzadeh
Editor A. Castellarin; Associate Editor E. Hassanzadeh
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the reviewers and the editors for their careful and valuable editing and suggestions, which greatly improved the quality of the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Author contributions
All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Xiaofei Li and Dawei Mu. Conceptualization, methodology, writing – review and editing, supervision, and funding acquisition were performed by Peiyue Li. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Xiaofei Li, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. Jifa Liu provided useful suggestions to the study. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Data availability statement
The authors declare that all data confirming the results of this study are available in public databases and the URLs for these databases are mentioned in the Data sources section.