CARRYING CAPACITY: CONCEPT AND ESTIMATION FOR URBAN AND BASIN SCALE

Abstract

Water is an essential basic resource for social and economic development. Ensuring its rightful availability to different stakeholders in the perspective of Sustainable Development of any region essentially requires a holistic and rational evaluation of its Carrying Capacity (CC). The carrying capacity can be studied on various levels, such as small-scale (town or city level), medium-scale (basin/ sub-basin level), and large-scale (national or global level). The concept is picking up slowly on an international scale, and a slew of methods have been proposed by researchers from around the globe, viz. supply-demand balance method, analytic hierarchy process, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method, principal component analysis method, systematic dynamic method, water footprint method, and MCDM, etc. Needless to say, each method has its own unique features and strengths. Carrying capacity has been studied on two scales, small scale (city) and medium scale (basin). For city-scale, Urban Carrying Capacity (UCC) has been evaluated based on water supply, sanitation, and solid waste management dimensions. On the medium scale, Water Resources Carrying Capacity (WRCC) has been evaluated on the basin scale based on the water availability, demand, and economy dimensions. Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach has been employed for developing the framework of both the scales viz. UCC and WRCC, which is classified into different levels such as dimension, criteria, and basic indicators. For the weight determination of each indicator, the Analytical Hierarchy process (AHP) method is used. The weights of each indicator are aggregated at different stages to calculate the criteria values, and therafter dimension values. The dimension values are finally aggregated to enumerate the final index value.