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The drivers of risk to water security in Shanghai

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Abstract

Big cities are often said to have big water problems, and Shanghai is no exception. In this paper, we examine and compare the influence of the major factors that give rise to the risk of water insecurity in Shanghai. There is an extensive and diverse literature on these issues, dealt with in isolation, and here, we provide a synthesis of the literature, together with our own assessments and calculations, to assess what are the risks to Shanghai’s water supply and what is our degree of confidence in this assessment. We describe the systems that supply water to the city, and past and future changes in the systems, including changes in the glaciers that supply some water to the river, changes in climate, changes in land use, the construction of dams, and water diversions. We show how, at the same time as Shanghai is increasing its dependence on the Yangtze river, water diversions and sea level rise are increasing the risk that this water will be too saline to consume at certain times of the year. This analysis suggests that most of the major drivers of the risk to water security in Shanghai are within the power of environmental managers to control.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Australian Research Council grant number DP110103381. The authors thank Chandra Jayasuriya for drawing the figures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Resource Management and Geography, University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia

    Brian L. Finlayson, Jon Barnett, Michael Webber & Mark Y. Wang

  2. State Key Laboratory for Estuarine and Coastal Research, East China Normal University, 3663 Zhongshan Beilu, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Taoyuan Wei, Maotian Li, Jing Chen & Zhongyuan Chen

  3. Department of Geography, East China Normal University, 3663 Zhongshan Beilu, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Hao Xu

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  1. Brian L. Finlayson
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  2. Jon Barnett
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  3. Taoyuan Wei
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  4. Michael Webber
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  6. Mark Y. Wang
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  7. Jing Chen
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  8. Hao Xu
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  9. Zhongyuan Chen
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Correspondence to Brian L. Finlayson.

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Finlayson, B.L., Barnett, J., Wei, T. et al. The drivers of risk to water security in Shanghai. Reg Environ Change 13, 329–340 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-012-0334-1

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