Assessing the impacts of South-to-North Water Transfer Project with decision support systems

The South-to-North Water Transfer Project is one of the four largest trans-century projects in China, which is expected to be completed by 2008. The project seeks to promote Northern China's economic growth by relaxing water constraints in a region now facing severe water shortage. In this paper, a decision support system (DSS) for assessing the social–economic impact of China's South-to-North (S2N) Water Transfer project is presented. The DSS provides decision support through simulation with an embedded water computable general equilibrium model (WCGE). The system is able to perform qualitative analysis on regional water resource vulnerability with mathematical modeling. In addition, the system is also able to examine a region's water demand–supply balance dynamics through forecasting with the WCGE model on the basis of various scenarios for the time horizon up to the year 2020. The what-if analysis performed by the DSS shows that the incremental water supply from the project helps the recipient region to catch up with the development pace of the country as a whole.