Evolution of China's water footprint and virtual water trade: A global trade assessment

Abstract

Water embodied in traded commodities is important for water sustainability management. This study provides insight into China's water footprint and virtual water trade using three specific water named Green, Blue and Grey. A multi-region input-output analysis at national and sectoral analysis levels from the years 1995 to 2009 is conducted. The evolution and position of China's virtual water trade across a global supply chain are explored through cluster analysis. The results show that China represented 11.2% of the global water footprint in 1995 and 13.6% in 2009. The green virtual water is the largest of China's exports and imports. In general, China is a net exporter of virtual water during this time period. China mainly imports virtual water from the USA, India and Brazil, and mainly exports virtual water to the USA, Japan and Germany. The agriculture sector and the food sector represent the sectors with both the largest import and export virtual water quantities. China's global virtual water trade network has been relatively stable from 1995 to 2009. China has especially close relationships with the USA, Indonesia, India, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Australia. Trade relations, resource endowment and supply-demand relationships may play key roles in China's global virtual water footprint network rather than geographical location. Finally, policy implications are proposed for China's long term sustainable water management and for global supply chain management in general.

Trends and driving forces of China’s virtual land consumption and trade

“…The cluster supports the idea that nodes within the same cluster have more dense links than the nodes outside this cluster (Blondel et al, 2008;Gao et al, 2015). According to our previous studies, a two phased cluster analysis based on undirected networks is applied for this study (Tian et al, 2018b).…”

Blind Spots in Water Management, and How Natural Sciences Could Be Much More Relevant

“…For the most part, economists' contributions to the virtual water (VW) and WF literature have not been as comprehensive as it should either. These contributions have focused on: a) computing VW and WF through economic tools such as multiregional input-output tables and models (Duarte and Yang, 2011;Tian et al, 2018); b) criticize or highlight limitations on the concept of VW based on the theory of comparative advantage (Wichelns, 2011;Gawel, 2014;Mateo-Sagasta et al, 2015;Wichelns, 2015); c) defend it or further explain factors completing the picture (Gawel, 2014;Afkhami et al, 2018;Zhao et al, 2019); and d) relate WF with scarcity and profitability, to obtain a visible 'water productivity' (Garrido et al, 2010;Cazcarro et al, 2019).…”

“…Shows the relevance of this distinction for WF studies (e.g., water-saving effect of mulching and drip irrigation). (Daniels et al, 2011;Duarte and Yang, 2011;Tian et al, 2018) Multi-region models, inputoutput Highlight the role of the full global chains for water (not just agri-food, energy, paper).…”

Quantity and quality of China's water from demand perspectives

“…Embodied water can be categorised by final demands from a demand perspective, which incorporate final consumption (rural consumption, urban consumption and government expenditures) and capital formation (fixed capital formation and inventory change) that can be redistributed as primary inputs to the economy, and export (Wu et al 2018, Wu et al 2019a. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to China's embodied water (Guan et al 2014), especially water embodied in the inter-regional trade for agriculture (Dalin et al 2014, Zhao et al 2015, Guo et al 2016 and for the whole supply chain (Cai et al 2017, Hou et al 2018, Tian et al 2018, Zhao et al 2019. These studies have provided insights into China's water and its contamination from demand perspectives before 2010.…”