Driving force analysis of water footprint change based on extended STIRPAT model: Evidence from the Chinese agricultural sector

The key impact factors of Chinese agricultural sector water footprint change play an important role in addressing China's current water resource pressures. However, commonly used water footprint accounting method can only describe the situation related water resource consumption and is difficult to analyze the driving forces that shape such a situation. In this study, by taking the Chinese agricultural water footprint from 1990 to 2009 as a case, we explore the influencing factors of population, affluence, urbanization level, and diet structure on agriculture products-related water footprint change based on an extended STIRPAT model. Empirical results reveal that the all examined factors as positive driving forces have pushed forward Chinese agricultural sector water footprint increases from 549.68 Gm³ in 1990 to 1016.64 Gm³ in 2009. Furthermore, the absolute values of normalized coefficients indicate that population has the largest positive contribution to increase the Chinese agricultural water footprint with an elastic coefficient of 0.9995, followed by affluence, diet structure, and urbanization level with elastic coefficients of 0.0874, 0.2662, and 0.2174, respectively. Finally, policies aiming at addressing current Chinese agriculture-related water resource crisis have been discussed.