Abstract
Despite efforts to reform management of water resources, groundwater levels have continued to decline steadily on the North China Plain, leading to serious environmental concerns and impacts. While policy makers have looked to efforts aimed at improving the efficiency of field-level irrigation and strengthening ownership and property rights in local resource management, hydrologists have asserted that more direct control of consumptive use patterns of water is needed. In this contribution, we show how both agricultural and urban demands for water can be managed, so as to ameliorate the depletion of groundwater resources in the North China Plain and promote long-run sustainability of limited water resources.
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Notes
- 1.
The middle route is the most likely option to be chosen and would supply the north with high-quality water with the help of gravitational force (Liu 1998).
- 2.
In the rest of the chapter, the term “real water savings” refers to the reduction in non-recoverable water losses that occur through such mechanisms as evapotranspiration or nonessential transportation, rather than through the reduction in seepage losses, which can be recovered further downstream in the water basin (Foster et al. 2003).
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Msangi, S. (2019). Managing Urban and Agricultural Water Demands in Northern China: The Case of Luancheng County, Hebei Province. In: Msangi, S., MacEwan, D. (eds) Applied Methods for Agriculture and Natural Resource Management. Natural Resource Management and Policy, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13487-7_7
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