In recent years the arid North East of China, and in particular Beijing, has suffered sporadic shortages of water. The causes of these events are manifold and like most manifestations of scarcity, water scarcity has important demand and supply side elements. Although on the supply side drought events have contributed to water shortages in the past few years, it is the nature of water demand that presents perhaps the most important determinant of water scarcity in Beijing. On the one hand, as a downstream user, surface water supplies to Beijing have been reduced by increased demands, largely from agriculture, in upstream areas of the Chao River (Hou, 2001). On the other hand, unprecedented economic growth and rural-to-urban migration in China as a whole means that urban water demand has increased both as the populous increases and as households become wealthier.
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Groom, B., Liu, X., Swanson, T., Zhang, S. (2008). Resource Pricing and Poverty Alleviation: The Case of Block Tariffs for Water in Beijing. In: Koundouri, P. (eds) Coping with Water Deficiency. Environment & Policy, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6615-3_9
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