Research on the Decoupling of Water Resources Utilization and Agricultural Economic Development in Gansu Province from the Perspective of Water Footprint

Abstract

Objectively evaluating the decoupling status of water resources utilization and economic development is an important sign of judging the sustainability of regional economic development. From the perspective of water footprint (WF), this paper expands the scope of water resources accounting by assessing agricultural blue WF, green WF and gray WF. The Tapio decoupling index was used to explore the decoupling status of agricultural WF and economic development in Gansu Province from 2006 to 2015, and the logarithmic mean divisor index (LMDI) decomposition model was used to identify the main driving factors of agricultural WF changes and explore the degree of divergence between agricultural economic development and water resources utilization. The results showed that agricultural economic growth was a main factor for the increase of WF; the improvement of agricultural production technology had a restraining effect, and the population effect and structural effect had a lesser effect. During the research period, the relationship between agricultural WF and economic growth in Gansu Province changed from weak decoupling to strong decoupling, and the contributing factors to decoupling were in descending order: economic, technological, structural and population. Finally, this paper puts forward suggestions on optimizing planting structure, improving agricultural technology and economic development mode to promote the sustainable development of local agriculture.

Decoupling analysis of water consumption and economic development of arid and semiarid regions in Northwest China

“…Feng et al (2020) decomposed the total emissions of PM 2.5 into energy, GDP and population. Referring to studies by Wang and Li (2018) and Shi et al (2020), we divided the impact factors of water resource utilization in arid and semiarid areas into water intensity effects, industrial structure effects, economic effects and population size effects.…”

Research on the decoupling relationship between water resources utilization and economic development at the county scale in Qian’nan Prefecture, Guizhou Province

“…Regarding research methodologies, the primary approaches include coupling coordination relationships (Xing et al, 2020), matching evolution relationships (Han et al, 2020), Tapio decoupling relationships (Wang and Yan, 2022), and others. In terms of research scale, the focus has been primarily on regional studies (Zhang et al, 2020;Ding et al, 2022;Wu et al, 2022;Bian et al, 2023;Montoya et al, 2023), sometimes involving provinces or cities (Wang et al, 2018;Shi et al, 2020;Chang and Zhu, 2021;Gong et al, 2021;Li et al, 2023;Cao et al, 2023) as the primary subjects, with limited exploration at the county level. In summary, the research on water resources and economic development has yielded significant results, but there are still some shortcomings: 1) Studies concerning the relationship between water resource utilization and economic development in karst county regions are relatively scarce.…”

Exploring the Regional Coordination Relationship between Water Utilization and Urbanization Based on Decoupling Analysis: A Case Study of the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei Region

“…The concept of water footprint (WF) has been introduced as an effective approach for regional water resources research in recent years [ 14 ]. WF allows for water resource utilization assessment from the perspectives of both water quantity and quality [ 10 , 15 ]. Thus, the virtual water footprint (VWF) can indicate the quantity of water consumption, including the water content used in the production processes of different regions (e.g., country [ 16 ], urban agglomeration [ 8 ], basin [ 17 ], city [ 17 ], etc.…”