Chia-Chun Lin

PhD Candidate
Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering

National Taiwan University

Chia-Chun Lin is a PhD candidate in Environmental Engineering at the National Taiwan University (NTU). The issue of global climate change lead her into the road of academic research. Her research focuses on developing water management models with impacts-oriented water footprint approach. Recently, she is working on two projects related to Food, Energy and Water nexus issues: "Bridging Food, Energy and Water nexus" funded by Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST, Taiwan) and an international cooperative project, "CRUNCH-Climate Resilient Urban Nexus Choices, Operationalizing the Food-Water-Energy Nexus", funded by Belmont Forum (the European Union). In these projects, she aimed at developing a comprehensive nexus tool to systematically evaluate the environmental impacts of a system. She is also passionate in learning presentation and communication skills in English, in which she has served as a Teaching Assistant of related courses for 3 semesters.

Valuing Regional Impacts of Water Consumption for Water Resource Management

Water footprint (WF) is a well-established method for quantifying direct and indirect water consumption of products, services or activities. However, it cannot be used to reveal the spatial heterogeneity of water consumption. This means that the WF of an activity will be the same wherever it happens. In reality, the consequences of consuming 1 m3 of water in a water abundant region and in an arid are different. Impact-oriented WF, multiplying a characterization factor (CF) by the WF, was developed to consider the water resources status of a region. Therefore, how to calculate the CF of a region was important. My research aims to deal with this issue. In the first part, a sector-wise midpoint CFs model at watershed scale was developed with consideration of water availability and competition for water between domestic, agricultural and industrial sectors and ecosystem. With this mid-point CFs, the influences (reduced quantity of available water) of an additional water consumption on each sector can be evaluated. In the second part, an end-point model by monetizing the consequence of water consumption on each sector was developed. This would be based on the cause-effect relationship of water shortage of each sector. For example, the industrial sector could apply desalination techniques to prevent water shortage, and the cost of desalination would be the main parameter in the end-point model. With the monetary results, the model can value the cost of water consuming activities and is expected to provide quantified and comparable results to support decision making.