Strategic Zoning for Urban Wastewater Reuse in China

摘要

It has been widely recognized that urban wastewater reuse is an alternative for water shortage problem. Although the improvement on urban wastewater reuse in China is quite significant, the further development still requires more strategic regulating and directing at the national level. However, due to the huge spatial differences in social-economic and resource conditions among different areas in China, it is difficult to apply a same policy framework to the whole country. In the paper, the mainland of China has been divided into 342 research regions and each region has one large-scale or medium-scale central city. The paper tried to answer the question how to select the development pattern of urban wastewater reuse for each region. Firstly, in order to evaluate the necessity and regional economic feasibility to develop urban wastewater reuse, an indicator system with three indexes at the upper level and seven indicators at the lower level was build up. And valuing method and the weight for each indicator was given. All the research regions covering the mainland of China has been scored with the indicator system. Secondly, the national strategic zoning has been done with the key method of cluster analysis. All regions have been sorted into five types of strategic development zones. Each zone has its own wastewater reuse development option such as Preferential Imperative Development, State Supporting Development, Self Supporting Development, Waiting for Development, and Non-Mandatory Development. Thirdly, the corresponding policy suggestion for each zone was given to the government. The possible updates between the different development patterns have been discussed as well.