Urban water resource management has emerged as a critical challenge facing cities worldwide, driven by the confluence of population growth, climate change, aging infrastructure, and increasingly complex patterns of water consumption. Traditional approaches to water management, which typically focus on supply augmentation or demand reduction in isolation, often fail to capture the dynamic feedback loops, time delays, and non-linear interactions that characterize real-world urban water systems. This study develops a comprehensive system dynamics model for urban water resource management, incorporating the interconnected subsystems of population, economy, water supply, water demand, and water quality. The model is designed to simulate the long-term coevolution of human and water systems, enabling policymakers to assess the systemic impacts of alternative management strategies before implementation. Using a representative fast-growing urban region as a case study, the model is calibrated with historical data from 2000 to 2020 and validated through rigorous historical and sensitivity testing. Four distinct scenarios are developed and simulated over a 30-year planning horizon from 2021 to 2050: business-as-usual, supply-oriented management, demand-side conservation, and integrated adaptive management. The simulation results, presented through three detailed data tables, reveal that the business-as-usual trajectory leads to increasing water stress, with water shortage rates exceeding 25 percent by 2050. Supply-oriented strategies provide temporary relief but prove insufficient to address long-term demand growth driven by economic expansion and urbanization. Demand-side conservation measures demonstrate greater effectiveness in reducing water consumption per unit of economic output, yet alone cannot fully eliminate water deficits. The integrated adaptive management scenario, combining supply efficiency, demand conservation, water reuse, and dynamic policy adjustment, achieves sustainable water balance while maintaining economic growth objectives. The findings underscore the necessity of adopting systems thinking in urban water planning and demonstrate the value of system dynamics modeling as a decision-support tool for navigating the complexities of water resource management in an era of accelerating global change.

Yunbo Pu. Research on Urban Water Resource Management Based on System Dynamics Model. The Frontiers of Society, Science and Technology (2026), Vol. 8, Issue 2: 1-8. https://doi.org/10.25236/FSST.2026.080201.

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