The Population Carrying Capacity of Water Resources in Yulin City

Assessing the water resource carrying capacity is beneficial for measuring the scale of industry and population agglomeration, and also avoiding the contradiction between increasing people and decreasing available water resource, due to the expansion of industry and city size. Based on the prediction model of optimum population development size, by using hydrological data, also with the demographic data from 1956 to 2010, this article analyzes and predicts the urban moderate scale under the limit of the water resource in the future of Yulin City by GIS. The main conclusions are as follows. There is growing tendency of water resources overloading. According to the result of model simulation, by 2015, the overload rate of population size will be 1.04. By 2020, the overload rate of population size will grow up to 1.08. The oversized population mainly comes from cities and towns. The overload rate for cities and towns in 2015 and 2020 is 1.89 and 1.73, respectively. With the expansion of cities and industries, suburban areas could have a great potential for carrying population, because lots of suburban people may move to cities and towns according to prediction. In view of the above-mentioned facts, the population size should be controlled in a reasonable range.