Abstract
Ningbo is a coastal megacity located at the East Coast of China and developing rapidly with proactive trading and export economic activities. The city owns a ranked top ten international port and it is the major strategic spot of 21st century maritime Silk Road from the “Belt and Road” policy established for promoting further international trades and developments. In future, populations and economy in Ningbo are expected continuously growing in the next few decades. The demand of quality freshwater resources thus is enormously increasing. Ningbo municipal government has established the “Five water management” (五水共治) policy in 2013 that aims to manage (i) sewage discharge; (ii) flooding; (iii) surface water; (iv) water conservation and (v) freshwater supply. Indeed, the municipal government also liaised and initiated the “Sponge City Program” after 2015 that Ningbo was selected as one of the pilot city; these policies and practices are successful up to now. This article adopts the case study of Ningbo to investigate the reasons of municipal government to promote the policy, to understand the public perception of this water management policy in Ningbo through conducted semi-structured interviews. During the 2017 and 2019, we conducted a questionnaire (N = 110) and interviews (N = 10) that follow up for justification of the public perception with the local communities. Our findings indicated that the communities had not been engaged closely with these practices, but generally supporting these two urban water management practices; and agreed that the urban water conditions (urban floods and pollution) had been improved. Also, the article discusses whether these (5 Water and SCP) practices can be extensively applied in other Chinese cities. We will provide recommendations at the end of the article.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Research grant on the Strategy and Practice of the Development of Sponge City in Ningbo New Eastern Town funded by the Ningbo Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau. We would like to send our gratitude for the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant numbers: 41850410497); the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant Number: 2019YFC1510400); and the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FoSE) Postgraduate Research Scholarship of University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Lastly,we also appreciated the research assistants Shuyang Xu, Liuge Yu, Wanying Gu, Ming Yuan, Rui Jiang, Yiming Wang for their support in 2017 summer data collection and GEOG 3042 module students in 2019 Winter data collection.
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Chan, F.K.S., Zhu, F., Li, L., Lu, M., Tang, YT., Griffiths, J. (2020). The Champion of Urban Water Resources Management in the Chinese City—The Case of Ningbo. In: Chan, F.K.S., Chan, H.K., Zhang, T., Xu, M. (eds) Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Resource Sustainability: Sustainable Urbanisation in the BRI Era (icRS Urbanisation 2020). icRSUrbanisation 2020. Environmental Science and Engineering. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9605-6_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9605-6_25
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