Study On Water Footprint In ChangChun City From 1994 To 2004

Water resource is not only the basic element of eco-environment, it is also an important and unreplaceable resource which sustains people to survive and develop. because of the influences of natural and artificial factors, water crisis is becoming more and more serious, which has become the bottle-neck of the sustainable development of social economic in many countries, and it is also one important problem of our country which needs to be resolved as quickly as possible in the 21st . Recently, with the population growing and the economic developing rapidly, water crisis becomes more serious in Changchun city, because of the groundwater over mining seriously, water pollution, the contradiction between the supply and the demand and the lack of perfect water-price-system. The resolution of water scarcity can be taken from two sides, one is to raise water using efficiency, the other is to innovate methods in water management. so it seems necessary to evaluate the quantity of water consumed as it goes. For this, the concept of water footprint, which is defined as the volume of water needed for the production of the goods and services consumed by the in habitants of the country, appears. As a composite index, it can reflects the total water requirement of the country (region) and measure the influences of people's consumption on water resource.In this paper, Changchun city is taken as a case to investigate the variation of water footprint from 1994 to 2004, the results indicate that the total water footprint increases slightly year by year, which remains at 23×108~25.5×108m3/a. it also shows that the average water footprint of citizens increases stably (1998 except), from 1007.48m3/per·a in 1994 to 1307.51 m3/per·a in 2004, and the average water footprint of peasant decreases continuously, from 807.16 m3/per·a in 1994 to 622.37 m3/per·a in 2004, the difference between city and countryside becomes greater. At last, the paper analyze the relations among the variation of water footprint, the average GDP, the consumption pattern and the influences of consumption diversities on it, and some ways to reduce the water footprint are brought forward in order alleviate water scarcity.