Analysis on fractal characteristics of implied water footprint of energy trade between China and countries along “the Belt and Road”

The bottom-up evaluation model was adopted to measure the implied water footjprint of energy trade between China and countries along “the Belt and Road”. The trade structure and types were analyzed, and the fractal method was used to deeply explore its rank-size rule. The results show that from 2001 to 2019, the export scale of China’s water footjprint of energy trade is small and shows a downward trend, and the import scale is large and growing rapidly. The trade structure is dominated by coal and oil water footjprint, and the proportion of natural gas water footjprint is small and continues to increase. The implied grey water footjPrint of energy trade is higher than that of blue water. From the perspective of the primacy index of trade scale, the primacy distrilbution of export scale of China’s water footjprint of energy trade is not obvious, and gradually tends to be obvious, while the primacy distrilbution of import is not obvious and shows a decentralized trend. The spatial distrilbution of rank-size of implied water footjprint of energy trade between China and countries along “the Belt and Road” presents multi-fractal structure. In the export, the high order level evolves from agglomeration to equililbrium, and the spatial distribution of medium and low rank i relatively scattered. Southeast Asia is main export region of China. In the import, the high-rank tends to be balanced, the medium-and low-rank tend to be weak, and the import areas are concentrated in a few countries in the Middle East, followed by Russia and Southeast Asia. © 2022, Editorial Board of Water Resources Protection. All rights reserved.