A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Loss and Driving Forces for the Middle Route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project from Humanistic Perspective

Abstract

Interbasin water transfer is a globally employed and significant strategy to address water scarcity, conflicts, and achieve specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The issue of water loss during the process of water transfer has garnered increasing attention with the construction of water diversion projects. This study aims to focus on the primary factors influencing the water loss in the Middle Route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (MR-SNWDP) from a humanistic perspective based on innovative comprehensive evaluation method of coupling qualitative and quantitative analysis. Additionally, the potential human factors are derived from a relatively large and objective indicator set rather than a limited set of manually selected. The results show that the number of optimal human factor (21, 20, 22, 22 and 21 for the main pipe and canal of MR-SNWDP, Beijing City, Tianjin City, Hebei Province, and Henan Province, respectively) is condensed by more than 65%, which has been categorized into social economy, science and technology culture, production and living, and management institution. The driving force behind these indicators varies greatly in different regions due to the difference of water resources endowment and utilization. Furthermore, the social economy factor exerts a negative influence on the typical SDGs (indicator 6.4.2 and indicator 6.5.2), and it has the greatest driving force among these human factors. Various potential humanistic strategies are proposed across these categories to enhance the efficiency of water transfer. Although this innovative method represents an initial application of optimizing human factor, it can also be extended for other complex decision-making.