Evaluation of groundwater sustainable development considering seawater intrusion in Beihai City, China.

The overmining of groundwater makes the aquifer in a coastal area prone to seawater intrusion and further leads to deterioration of water quality and ecosystem degradation. However, the vulnerability evaluation of seawater intrusion can provide a scientific basis for the prevention of seawater intrusion, and then ensure the sustainable use of groundwater. In this paper, Baihai City was taken as the study area, and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), variable power theory, and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method were used synthetically. The vulnerability of seawater intrusion in the study area was divided into lowest vulnerability, low vulnerability, medium vulnerability, and high vulnerability, and these correspond to 1739.98, 133.88, 664.32, and 737.55 km2. On this basis, combined with the groundwater quality and quantity and ecosystem of the study area, the groundwater is divided into concentrated groundwater supply area (8.16%), decentralized groundwater supply area (12.44%), protected area (78.94%), and reserved zone (0.45%), which can provide the basis for the rational exploitation and management of groundwater. By analyzing the results of constant right and variable weight evaluation, combined with the history of seawater intrusion, it is proved that the variable weight evaluation model can effectively solve the unreasonable situation caused by the internal differences of the indicator, so that the evaluation results are more in line with reality. In addition, the application of the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method makes the evaluation results clearer.