Energy-Flow Driven Relocation Of Water Resource And Health Impacts In China

As the impact of climate change intensifies and extreme weather increases,the management of water resources becomes increasingly important.The utilization of water is closely related to energy.The production and utilization of fossil energy requires a large amount of water.There are two problems of unbalanced distribution in China.First,the geographical distribution of energy production and consumption is unbalanced.Second,the geographical distribution of water and fossil energy is uneven,and the supply of fossil energy mainly comes from the water-scarce northern regions.In recent years,the growth of energy demand has driven the rapid development of traditional fossil energy industries.Due to the influence of haze,the national energy policy tends to directly utilize energy in the origin region,which both aggravates water pressure and increases potential risks such as water pollution.The energy trade separates the production side from the consumption side,thus the consumption of water resources for producing energy has also undergone along the supply chain.In view of this,the concept of "Energy Embodied Water"(EEW)has been define to measure the water resources consumed in the production of energy.Based on the multi-area input-output model,we can explore the flow of EEW among provinces.We found that the provinces with the most EEW net outflow are Shanxi,Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.The characteristics of inter-provincial flow of EEW in China are flowing from the inland areas to the coastal areas,from the underdeveloped areas to the developed areas and from the poor water areas to the abundant water area.Such a flow pattern aggravates the uneven distribution of water,and lead to the problem of water scarcity in the outflow areas,which resulted in the additional burden of digest disease.We further empirically analyzes the relationship between water resources issues and the burden of digestive disease,so as to quantify the additional disease burden of the energy-production areas caused by the consumption side's energy demand.Results show that the flow of embodied water and embodied pollution have aggravated the digestive disease burden in energy production areas,such as Shanxi.