China’s severe water challenges as a result of rapid social and economic development, has led to significant impacts on regional
eco-security, ecosystem service and human health. Grounded in ancient Chinese human ecological philosophy, a social-economic-natural
complex ecosystem-based approach ‘China Water Vision’ is briefing to help people understand and simplify the complicated ecological
dynamics and cybernetics of water. To transform the complexity vision into a sustainability mission, an integrative and adaptive
management approach is being enhanced through capacity building including philosophical rethinking, institutional reform and
technological renovation so as to transform reductionism to holism, fragmented to integrated management, and physical to ecological
engineering.
Rapid industrialization and urbanization have taken place in China since its opening up to the world and transition from planned
to market economy. In the past 28 years, China’s average annual economic growth rate (GDP) was about 9.67%. The pace, depth,
and magnitude of this transition, while bringing prosperity to citizens, have exerted severe ecological stresses on local
human living conditions and regional water sustainability. Water shortage, contamination, flooding and drought are only the
surface symptoms of the water issue. Its indirect and long term impacts on regional and global eco-security are far-reaching.
Water sustainability can only be assured with a human-ecological understanding of the complex interaction among environmental,
economic, and social/cultural factors.
In dealing with this complexity, the key issue is to allow more people to understand China’s comprehensive water vision, its
ecological dynamics and cybernetics, and search for effective technological instruments including integrative planning, engineering,
management and capacity building to promote water sustainability (Fig. 1).
Key words ecological - complexity - sustainability - China - integrative water management
This study is financially supported by the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 70433001) and
Knowledge Innovation Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (No.KZCX2-YW-324; KZCX2-YW-422)