Study on Water Resource Carrying Capacity of Huaihe River Basin Based on SENCE Framework

Abstract The Huaihe River Basin (HRB) is a key area for water resources management and ecological protection in China, and there are regional differences and pressures in the current water resources carrying capacity (WRCC) of the basin. Therefore, this study selects five provinces (cities) in HRB as the research object, and constructs a WRCC evaluation system covering three aspects and 18 indicators based on the conceptual framework of socio-economic-natural composite ecosystem (SENCE). Through the entropy weight-TOPSIS method and grey correlation analysis (GRA), the WRCC of HRB during the period of 2013–2022 was measured and the main driving factors were analysed. The results show that (1) there are significant differences in WRCC levels in different regions, with the overall performance of downstream > upstream > midstream, and the province with the highest score is Jiangsu (0.576). (2) The trend of WRCC changes experienced a period of fluctuating decline (2013–2015), a period of slow growth (2016–2019) and a period of stability (2020–2022). (3) The social subsystem of WRCC is stable, the economic subsystem has large regional differences, and the pressure on the natural composite ecosystem increases. (4) The main drivers of the WRCC are urbanisation rate (0.8957), GDP per capita (0.8632) and daily domestic water consumption per capita (0.8547).