Dan Wu, Zhuling Pan

Dan Wu

14 June 2023

Water-use efficiency, Evaluation, Indicators, Model, Knowledge graph.

Based on 1084 international water efficiency research literature collected from the core collection of Web of Science from 2007 to 2022, CiteSpace software was used to visualize and analyze the research institutions, teams, and keywords published in the literature, systematically sorting out the hotspots and evolution of international water efficiency research, and revealing the progress of international water efficiency evaluation research. Research has shown that the evaluation of water-use efficiency essentially takes water resources and related capital and labor as input indicators, and corresponding economic, ecological, and social benefits as output indicators, and constructs a suitability indicator system based on regional or industry characteristics. Based on the characteristics of traditional DEA models and their extended models, the authors select models that match the research object, purpose, and content for water efficiency evaluation, and determine the direction for future improvement of water efficiency in the region or industry. In this evaluation process, it is necessary to clarify the impact of factors such as economic development, social benefits, and ecological protection on water-use efficiency based on regional economic and social characteristics or industry water use structure, improve the efficient, intensive, and economical utilization capacity of water resources, and achieve coordinated development of water resources, economy, society, and environment. In the future, there is an urgent need to deeply implement the concept of green development, explore suitable water resource utilization models for different regions and industries, construct targeted evaluation index systems and operable evaluation models based on this, and improve the research on water-use efficiency evaluation methods.

© 2023, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license