Indicators and indices for sustainable water use in South Korea

Abstract:

After the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 established a mandate for the UN to establish a set of indicators of sustainable development, the indicators to gauge sustainability have been widely used. In the water sector, the concept of sustainable water use has been used in many different ways. In this study, we aimed to develop sustainability indicators and indices for sustainable water use in South Korea. We identified major indicators for sustainable water use with considering multiple aspects of water use: not only physical, biological and chemical aspects but also social and environmental aspects. Furthermore, stressors for sustainable water use were of major interests because they were straightforward and easy to measure in comparison to indicators representing the state- and impact-related indictors. As a result, sets of indicators were identified with a theme-based hierarchical approach, including 1) human water requirements, 2) renewability of water resources, 3) water quality requirements, 4) health of aquatic ecosystems and 5) equitable water use. Then for each sub-component, multiple indicators, i.e., proxy variables were identified. We have evaluated our indicators and indices for drainage basins as well as grid boxes with multiple sizes of 0.5 km and 0.25 km in South Korea. Indicator data were collected for concurrent time, 2010 per se, with number of datasets from earlier or later times and integrated. At last, we evaluated sustainability index with focusing on the spatial variability of index and indicators and the sensitivity of index to individual indicators. Also the sensitivities of indices to different spatial scales were examined.