Assessment of Water Resources Vulnerability Index by Nation

Abstract

Discussions for water resources vulnerability and index development with sustainable concept are actively being made in recent years. Based on such index, water resources vulnerability of present and future is determined and diagnosed. This study calculated the water resources vulnerability rankings by 152 nations, using indicator related to water resources assessment that can be obtained from World Bank, VRI (Vulnerability Resilience Indicator), ESI (Environmental Sustainability Index). In order to quantitatively assess of water resources vulnerability based on this indicator, TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) technique was applied to index water vulnerability and to determine the rankings by nations. As a results, South Korea was ranked as the 88th among the 152 nations including Korea. Among the continents, Oceania was the least vulnerable and Afirica was the most vulnerable in continents. WUnited State, Japan, Korea and China were vulnerable in order among the major countries. Therefore, water resources vulnerability rankings by nations in this study helps us to better understand the situation of South Korea and provide the data for water resources planning and measure.

Delineation of groundwater potential map using GIS and MCDM in Geumgang River basin, South Korea

“…The TOPSIS technique, developed by Hwang and Yoon (1981), selects an ideal solution that is close to a Positive Ideal Solution (PIS) and far from a Negative Ideal Solution (NIS). Therefore, it is a method to find an ideal solution through the Euclidean distance and is also used to solve various problems related to climate change (Kim and Chung, 2013;Chung et al, 2014;Won et al, 2014). The advantage of TOPSIS is that the only subjective element required in the evaluation process is the weight of the factors, which is a method that focuses on evaluating a factor rather than the weighting (Olson, 2004).…”

The Water Resilience Index: A New, Flexible Tool to Comprehensively Monitor Sustainable Development Performance of Water Resource and Environmental System

“…Resilience of WRES has been studied by scholars around the world as a global issue. Won et al (2014) used Vulnerability Resilience Indicator, Environmental Sustainability Index from World Bank to calculate water resources vulnerability rankings for 152 nations. However, it only focused on the negative perspective but didn't reflect the positive aspects of resilience itself, nor did it explain why they were chosen.…”

“…These studies had proposed the connotations of water resilience at different levels and revealed that water resilience can't be measured by a certain indicator or aspect. In summary, these studies deconstructed the connotation of water resilience from different perspectives, such as vulnerability (Schismenos et al, 2021;Mansur et al, 2016;Won et al, 2014;Anandhi and Kannan, 2018), and hydrologic resilience (Teodoro et la., 2023;Leong, 2016;Sinha et al, 2018), or various aspects, such as water supply (Pagano et al, 2018;Makropoulos et al, 2018;Balaei et al, 2020;Rasoulkhani et al, 2020), and urban drainage (Yang et al, 2020;Mcclymont et al, 2020), which can provide reference for this study. However, previous efforts haven't fully understood the concept of water resilience, and lacked the important aspects of water disaster recovery, water saving, water self-purification and water pollution control revealed from water cycle.…”

Evaluate Urban Resilience in Light of Water Resources and Identify Critical Driving Factors-a Case Study from the Yangtze River Economic Belt's Lower Reaches

“…But the research perspective had gradually shifted from single disciplines, such as disaster management and urban planning, to multidisciplinary and integrated research. Especially as water resources have become an important resource endowment of cities, scholars have begun to pay more attention to integrate water resources to UR (Won et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2019), especially water quality management.…”