title: Uncovering regional disparity of China's water footprint and inter-provincial virtual water flows.
abstract: With rapid economic development in China, water crisis is becoming serious and may impede future sustainable development. The uneven distribution of water resources further aggravates such a problem. Under such a circumstance, the concepts of water footprint and virtual water have been proposed in order to respond water scarcity problems. This paper focuses on studying provincial disparity of China's water footprints and inter-provincial virtual water trade flows by adopting inter-regional input-output (IRIO) method. The results show that fast developing areas with larger economic scales such as Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang, Shanghai and Xinjiang had the largest water footprints. The most developed and water scarce areas such as Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin and Shandong intended to import virtual water, a rational choice for mitigating their water crisis. Xinjiang, Jiangsu, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi and Hunan, had the largest per GDP water intensities and were the main water import regions. Another key finding is that agriculture water footprint was the main part in water footprint composition and water export trade. On the basis of these findings, policy implications on agriculture geographical dispersion, consumption behavior changes, trade structure adjustment and water use efficiency improvement are further discussed.
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Environmental Studies, 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan; Key Lab on Pollution Ecology and Environmental Engineering, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China.
authors.forename: Huijuan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Dong
authors.affiliation: School of Environmental Science and Technology, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200240, China; Key Lab on Pollution Ecology and Environmental Engineering, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China. Electronic address: ygeng@sjtu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Geng
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Environmental Studies, 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan. Electronic address: fujita77@nies.go.jp.
authors.forename: Tsuyoshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Fujita
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Environmental Studies, 16-2 Onogawa, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan.
authors.forename: Minoru
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fujii
authors.affiliation: National Institute for Material Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba 305-0044, Japan.
authors.forename: Dong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Hao
authors.affiliation: Key Lab on Pollution Ecology and Environmental Engineering, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China.
authors.forename: Xiaoman
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Yu
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D002681:China; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D003710:Demography; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D014881:Water Supply / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*
keywords: IRIO; Regional disparity; Trade balance; Virtual water; Water footprint