Assessment of water resource security in Chongqing City of China: What has been done and what remains to be done?

Water resources are the basis of both regional sustainable development and a sustainable socioeconomy. Moreover, the evaluation of water resource security is a prerequisite for effective water resources management. Existing water resource problems have become one of the most significant factors limiting sustainable development. How to effectively identify stress factors and assess existing water resource management measures is important basis to achieve security issues. With Chongqing City of China, stress factors and the efficiency of water management measures were evaluated in this paper. The pressure, status, and response framework allows for the assessment of water resources based on three subsystems: the pressure subsystem, the status subsystem, and the response subsystem. Using an entropy-weighted set pair model, Chongqing’s water resource security from 2000 to 2011 was evaluated in an effort to determine the source of the pressure on the water resources system and to evaluate the efficiency of present response measures. The results show that water resource security has generally improved in Chongqing, which was in the Moderate Warning Level from 2000 to 2006 and in the Critical Safety Level from 2007 to 2011. The pressure on the water resources system in Chongqing mainly comes from rapid economic growth, urbanization, and the development of agriculture in Three Gorges Reservoir. However, some response measures have exhausted their capacity for improvement, while the enforcement of others has not been adequate. The main reason for improvement in the water resources system in Chongqing is the increase in forest coverage and the continuous investment in ecological management of the Three Gorges Reservoir. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015