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In this paper, we attempt to answer the following questions: Which factors determine college students' water-saving behaviors? The answer can enable colleges to take targeted water management measures to promote water-saving behaviors of students. Based on the theory of planned behavior and the combination of attitude-situation-behavior theory, this paper built a comprehensive theoretical model with sociodemographic characteristics, psychological characteristics as external dependent latent variables, situational factors as moderating variables, and water-saving behaviors as internal dependent latent variables. The research investigated 742 students in China colleges, and used corresponding methods to analyze the different types of the influencing factors of students' water-saving behaviors. The results show that the sociodemographic characteristics of college students have no significant impact on water-saving behaviors; the psychological characteristics have a significant impact on individual water-saving behaviors; the situational factors have a significant moderating effect on individual water-saving behaviors of students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper selected administration and public services, residential areas, roads, green space, parking areas, industrial areas and commercial and business facilities in Wuxi city, China, to analyze the characteristics of pollution accumulation, wash-off and potential risk areas of pollutants over different urban land uses and pavement surface materials. Results showed that green space, residential areas and roads sequestrated higher pollutants than that of other land uses. Materials of masonry and cement pavement accumulated higher pollutant concentration than that on the marble and asphalt pavement. The potential risk areas of non-point source pollution were located in the old residential areas in the downtown region. The results of wash-off simulation showed that the first flushing effect was obvious during the initial period of rainfall. Eighty percent of the accumulative total nitrogen or total suspended solid could be washed-off during the first 25.6–50.2% period of the rainfall events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of water quotas has an important practical significance in promoting urban standards for water utilization. Currently, industrial water quotas are highly arbitrary, inadequately restrictive, and impractical. This paper considers the example of the Wuhan City hospital industry. Common factors of industrial water use and major differences in water utilization structures were considered, and the principles of partial least squares (PLS) analysis were applied to establish an evaluation model for water utilization levels in this industry. Residuals were used to introduce the corresponding adjustment coefficients, and a dynamic model of water quotas in the hospital industry was constructed. Experimental results revealed that for this dynamic model, 80% of the samples examined exhibited errors of 20% or less; thus, the dynamic approach was superior to traditional approaches for quota determination, where only 40% of samples had errors of 20% or less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global flood management is a major issue for most cities which have to deal with worsening factors such as climate change and fast urban growth. Computer models have been used to model and understand urban flooding on a local scale in cities (25–50 km2). It has been practically impossible to model bigger cities in one go in sufficiently high resolution due to the heavy computations involved. The present paper describes a new modelling approach for urban flooding which allows modelling on large city scale (1000 km2) while keeping sufficient resolution, e.g. 5 m or 10 m grid. The multicell approach is applied for the city of Beijing for July 21st, 2012 flood event. Model results are compared to testimonials from the 2012 event. Comparison to traditional 2D urban flood computations shows that the multicell approach is much faster than standard detailed models while keeping a suitable level of precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, local floods have become severely threatening to urban safety in China. As the capital city, Beijing has experienced serious local floods every year. In this paper spatial characteristics of local floods in the Beijing urban area were studied. Local flood locations changed and appeared as a spatial expansion trend from 1981 to 2011. Since all of the local floods were located in built-up areas, we further studied the relation between local floods and built-up areas using the spatial statistics of Geographic Information Systems. The results show that they had the same directional development trend which indicated local floods would get worse with the expansion of built-up areas. It also found that most local floods were located where there were high densities of drainage pipes, so we could infer that pipe systems should not be the only way to solve local floods due to their failures and negative effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change and human activities have changed a number of characteristics of river flow in the northwest of China. Numerous problems such as water resource shortage, drying up of rivers, water pollution are the direct consequences of these changes. In this paper, we used the example of Yulin city in northwest China to assess the spatio-temporal characteristics and driving forces of annual river flow changes. Our research was based on the long-term time series of hydrological data from 1956 to 2005, to analyse annual flow in four main rivers (Kuye River, Tuwei River, Wuding River and Jialu River). The river flow depends upon the runoff characteristics of the river catchment, therefore we used variation ratio, variation index, unevenness, Runoff-Concentration Degree (RCD) and Runoff-Concentration Period (RCP) to determine the change in runoff characteristics of the four main rivers flows of the Yulin city. We tested the tendency of runoff by the Mann-Kendall non-parameter statistical method to obtain the temporal evolution law. At the same time, Kriging spatial interpolation and GIS were used to derive the spatial evolution law. The dates of climate change (precipitation) and human activities were also used to calculate the driving forces for annual runoff changes of the rivers’ catchments. Through the accumulation curves and multi-recursive techniques, we built the correlation between precipitation and runoff. The driving factors for annual runoff change were then calculated by using the runoff coefficient method. Results showed that the distribution of annual runoff was uneven and had a small accumulation in July and August, especially in Kuye River, and there seemed to be a significant reducing trend in annual runoff. Isolines and the thematic map of Mann-Kendall tests U(R) revealed that the Tuwei River's catchment is the most affected catchment, with annual runoff substantially changed. At the 5% significance level, precipitation did not significantly drop compared with annual runoff. We also found that precipitation is not the only factor responsible for the decreased annual runoff. Therefore we included human activities affect in this case study by using the past 25 years land use, water conservancy and urbanisation data. We discriminated the impacts of climate change and human activities on the surface runoff by multi-recursive analysis method and runoff coefficient method. The results showed that human activities are the direct cause for the changes of river runoff. The results of the study also revealed that the Wuding and Jialu rivers had the most and the least changes in the runoff respectively; this phenomenon should be seriously considered for future water resources planning and management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current paper describes a pricing strategy for urban wastewater treatment, as informed by model simulations. First, the concepts and principles related to wastewater service charges are discussed. An analysis is made of the economic conditions of Wuhan city in China. Then, a pricing model is established for setting wastewater service charges for the Wuhan Urban Drainage Development Co., Ltd (WUDDC). By including user - demand elasticity and government subsidy, model simulations are used to predict the future financial status of WUDDC. Finally, recommendations are made based on the model results, aimed at developing and improving Wuhan's local policy for setting wastewater service charges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]