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Abstract

Water resources as an integral part of the human-water system have been increasingly challenged due to the pressures from rapid urbanization, competing demands and increasing extreme weather events. Domestic water supply is among the most essential water uses. Despite the system dynamics of regional and urban water management being complex and continuously evolving due to changing climate and socioeconomics, models can help to evaluate our current understanding of long-term processes in this system and simulate possible future system states. This paper outlines the applications of a previously developed socio-hydrological model to explore the coevolutionary system’s behavior of domestic water supply and socioeconomic interactions in fast-growing urban regions. Human feedback, which incorporates the response to water scarcity and environmental damage, was regarded using a social memory concept. Our main objective is to explore the drivers for development of regional water transfer and assess the impact of environmental sensitivity to groundwater depletion on the supply-demand subsystem. This process of linking regional water resources and social interactions manifests itself in proof‐of‐concept applications for urban case studies. We also discuss some challenges and potentials of the approach. The results indicate it can be used as an exploratory tool to capture the influences of parameters on long-term trends of domestic water and develop future scenarios. Nevertheless, due to the specific boundary conditions and system properties of only a few individual case studies, the results can hardly be generalized or transferred to other systems, specifically for the economy of water supply companies, such as water prices.