However, regional differences are observable depending on the progress of industrialization, 33% in Japan, and 16% in Korea. To consider the impact of industrialization on water resources, the issue expected to continue to be important, let us now review time-series relationships between changes in industrialization, changes in structure of water resource consumption, and manufacturing sector's share of water consumption.
In the past 30 years in Japan, where the service industry's prosperity reflects the falling growth of the manufacturing sector's share, the water consumption of the latter sector has dropped slightly from 18.7% to 17.0%. In Korea with its early industrialization after Japan, the manufacturing sector's share has grown 20% while its share of water consumption doubled has from 4.3% to 9.4% over the past 20 years. The industrial share of water consumption has also doubled in Indonesia as one part of the target of the nation's economic plan, due to the rapid industrialization (the level has doubled in the past 30 years). The differential increases in industrial water consumption against the growth of output reflect different levels of industrial development, so we need to take into account the different components of demand for industrial water.
"Industrial water" is defined by the Water Resources White Paper of the Japanese government, as including a variety of Uses such as for boilers, raw materials, product processing, cleaning, temperature adjustment, etc. The greatest consumers are the chemical industry, the steel industry, and the paper and pulp industry. In Japan, basic material type industries, including these three, together account for 84% of the total consumption.
Such industrial dependence on water resource is common to other countries as well, and the level of progress in industrialization is seen in the trend of the share of industrial consumption of water resources, as mentioned above. It should be noted that the flattened industrial consumption of water of Japan in recent years is due to the advanced resource saving measures.
