Telecoupling in urban water systems: an examination of Beijing’s imported water supply

ABSTRACT

Urban centres increasingly have difficulties meeting water needs within their hydrologic basins. To sustain urban water supply, cities and water source regions have increased telecouplings (socio-economic and environmental interactions over distances). To analyse these complex interactions, we apply the new telecoupling framework to the water-stressed megacity of Beijing’s imported water supply. We found that Beijing’s remote water sources have lower risk than local supply, but connections impact the sending systems. The telecoupling framework provides a standard, systematic and flexible tool for evaluating the sustainability of urban water supply. It also identifies a number of research gaps for future quantification efforts.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban water management
• telecoupling
• sustainability
• virtual water
• inter-basin transfer
• Beijing

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are extended to Wu Yang for his helpful comments and data compilation efforts from the Beijing Statistical Yearbooks and Beijing Water Bulletin. The authors are also grateful to the reviewer and editors for their constructive comments made on earlier versions of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank Michigan State University’s Distinguished Fellowship Program and Water Initiative Research Grant for providing funding for this work. Jillian Deines was supported by NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program [grant number 14-EARTH14F-198].