Along with the accelerating process of the urbanization and the growing population, the urban water supply becomes more and more a serious issue in China. Improving the water use efficiency is an effective way to alleviate the water supply problem. This paper analyzes the data of the total amount of water supply, the number of employees, the fixed-asset investment, the COD and ammonia emissions and the regional GDP of 113 key environmental protection cities in 2014, to evaluate the comprehensive efficiency, the technical efficiency and the scale efficiency of water utilization of the 113 cities, and to obtain the spatial distribution of the efficiency. It is shown that the overall water resource utilization efficiency of the 113 cities is relatively high, but there is still room for improvement. The spatial difference of the water use efficiency is significant. The comprehensive efficiency of the eastern cities is generally high, followed by the northeastern cities and the central cities. The efficiency of the western cities is low, which shows the polarization of the efficiency distribution.

cities  /  water resource  /  comprehensive efficiency  /  data envelopment analysis