Comfort Value of Water: Natural-artificial Dual-structured Analytical Framework for Comfort Assessment of Regional Water Environment and Landscape System

The ternary water cycle of ‘nature–society–trade’ in the inland arid areas

“…The concept of a ‘nature–artificiality’ binary water cycle can be traced back to the water cycle process with the ‘artificial side branch cycle’ proposed by Chinese scholar Chen (1986). Since then, many researchers have considered that the water cycle system influenced by human activities shows the characteristics of ‘nature–artificiality’, and the theoretical framework of the ‘nature–artificiality’ binary water cycle has been gradually formed and improved with the development of relevant empirical studies (Liu et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2006; Yang et al, 2012). Since British scholar Allan (1993) first proposed the concept of virtual water in the 1990s, virtual water trade has gradually become a hot research area in water resources management in recent decades.…”

“…Based on the ternary feature of ‘nature–artificiality–virtual water’ in the water cycle, for the first time, the ‘nature–society–trade’ ternary water cycle model driven commonly by the three forces of nature, artificiality and economy was proposed by Deng et al (2020), but not much has been done in terms of model empirical research. In summary, there are many studies on natural water cycle (Berghuijs et al, 2017; Chandanpurkar et al, 2021; Godoy et al, 2021; Zhan et al, 2019), ‘nature–artificiality’ binary water cycle, social water cycle and virtual water trade (Liu et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2014; Yang et al, 2012), but few researchers take the ‘nature–society–trade’ ternary water cycle as a system to conduct empirical studies on the formation of regional water resources and its cyclic transformation process (Deng et al, 2020). In addition, at present, many studies on the water cycle in arid inland river basin areas are mostly at the aspect of natural water cycle (Kulaixi et al, 2023; Wang et al, 2023; Xie et al, 2022), and our study is also instructive for water resources management in arid inland river basin areas.…”