A Dynamic Water Resources Management Approach in Beijing Using System Dynamics Model

Water resources constrain the scale and quality of social and economic development in many water shortage cities and regions. Thus, the management via dynamic water resources prediction is a key for the overall city strategic planning. In this study, an integrated dynamic model of water consumption was developed using system dynamics (SD) and based on water resources carrying capacity (WRCC) theory. The urbanization speed described quantitatively by urban population growth was taken as a key index of WRCC under the conditions of favorable ecological cycle and stable increasing on industrial and agricultural output values. An application of this model was demonstrated in Beijing, China within the time horizon 2003-2020, based on 17-year (1986-2003) historic data. The simulation result showed that the WRCC in Beijing would be very fragile and unable to meet the social-economic development of the city in long run if the present water consumption style was continued. We further analyzed four different possible modes for water consumptions in Beijing, and concluded that the long-term city planning horizon can be reached only when various measures were jointly implemented together. In this case, the predicting trend of carrying capacity of urban population would have a good agreement with the actual data, and the WRCC would satisfy all the requirements as well.