Abstract: With the rapid economic development and the increasing demand of water resources，the study on what kind of development pattern arid region of China should take to slow down the water consumption of economy development has become one hot spot of the current research. In this paper，using the IGT equation，the impact of the economic development on water consumption in Wuwei City，Gansu Province，China，from 1997 to 2010 was analyzed. Based on this，using the STIRPAT model，this study analyzed quantitatively the relationship between the total consumption of  the water resources and population，affluence，the level of the urbanization and technological advances. Ridge regression results showed that 1% change of population，per capita GDP，urbanization level and technology advance would cause a corresponding occurrence of 0.790 1%，-（0.014 1+0.0018 lnA）%，-0.088 0% and 0.031 2% change in the total consumption of the water resources. Based on the analysis of the above model，this paper took Wuwei City in Shiyang River Basin as an example and set 10 developing scenarios and analyzed the best model of reducing the total consumption of water resources. Results show that under the scenario of keeping the economy in high-speed growth，speeding the process of urbanization，making great progress in water-saving and high population control，it would be best for Wuwei to reduce the total consumption of water resources，and the total consumption of water resources in 2015，2020 would be 188 927.27 and 184 409.79 ten thousand cubic meters，respectively. Although the total consumption of water resources has been reduced，it still cannot effectively change the situation that the groundwater overexploited and the ecological security in Wuwei City cannot be effectively contained，Wuwei City’s environmental load will remain in a state of high alert for a long time. In this paper， the STIRPAT model and ridge regression fitting were used to find out how to alleviate the pressure of the water resources in Wuwei City，data analysis is well-found，but it is lack of the practical guiding significance. Although it is an innovation point that the STIRPAT model was used to research the best approach for Wuwei to reduce the total consumption of water resources in this paper，there are still some shortages，such as all the factors （P，A，U，T） are how to influence the total water resources and each factor is how to influence each other，it needs to be further in-depth researched.

Key words: STIRPAT model, water consumption, developing scenario, environmental Kuznets curve, Wuwei City