ZHAO Yong, LI Haihong, LIU Hanqing, WANG Lizhen, HE Guohua, WANG Hao

The development trend and growth limit of total water consumption are related to the macro decision-making of national water resources management and the layout of major water conservancy facilities. This paper proposed the ternary water-use driving mechanism of socioeconomic scale, production level and water supply, constructed an Adaptive Increase Curve Yielding to the Resource-Constrained (AIR curve) and growth law, and summarized and put forward the socioeconomic characteristic parameters and quantitative discrimination basis related to the emergence of peak water consumption. The study took prefecture-level cities as the basic unit, classified and judged the future growth trend of total water consumption of 358 prefecture-level administrative regions in China, and further predicted national and regional peak water consumption and their occurrence time. The results show that under the framework of the most stringent water resources management system and existing engineering planning system, China's water consumption peak is likely occur in 2037, with a peak water consumption of about 648 billion m3. Based on the historical law and future forecast of China's water consumption, this paper put forward the illusion of the current inflection point of total water consumption and the phenomenon of water supply ceiling, analyzed the growth trend of water demand of different sectors, and discussed the uncertainty of the peak water consumption in China.

Keywords: water-use driving mechanism, growth law, growth threshold, China’s water consumption peak, uncertainty