• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.49 no.8
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• pp.685-692
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• 2016

This study aimed to develop the indicator-based approach to assess water use vulnerability in watersheds and applied to the unit watershed within the Han River watershed. Vulnerability indices were comprised of three sub-components (exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity) with respect to water use. The indicators were made up of 16 water use indicators. Then we estimated vulnerability indices using the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution approach (TOPSIS). We collected environmental and socio-economic data from national statistics database, and used them for simulated results by the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model. For estimating the weighted values for each indicator, expert surveys for subjective weight and data-based Shannon's entropy method for objective weight were utilized. With comparing the vulnerability ranks and analyzing rank correlation between two methods, we evaluated the vulnerabilities for the Han River watershed. For water use, vulnerable watersheds showed high water use and the water leakage ratio. The indices from both weighting methods showed similar spatial distribution in general. Such results suggests that the approach to consider different weighting methods would be important for reliably assessing the water use vulnerability in watersheds.