The Evaluation of Water Security: Research Methods of Water Resources Carrying Capacity

With the growth of population, water security has become the worldwide problem combined with severe environment pollution,quick economic development andirrational water allocation. Based on sustainable development, Water resources carrying capacity (WRCC) driven from physics originally has been proposed to solve it. The measurement of WRCC can tell decision-makers that how much population the water resource can feed, what degree water resources can support the economic and so on.Because the decision-makers can make adaptive decisions based on the correct evaluation of WRCC, the ways of the assessment of WRCC are very important. This paper focuses on how to measure WRCC by selecting three typical methods, fuzzy model of comprehensive evaluation, multiple criteria analysis (MCA) and system dynamics (SD) methods. The characteristics of these methods are good at solving the multi-objective and complicated problem in common which is the trait of WRCC. The differences of them are the specific process of analysis and evaluation.