Comprehensive evaluation of water ecological environment in watersheds: a case study of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

Abstract

The Yangtze River Economic Belt, as an inland economic zone with global influence, has shown a trend of prosperous economic development in recent years. In 2020, the total population of the Yangtze River Economic Belt accounted for nearly 50% of China's total population, and the GDP has reached 471,580 billion yuan. With economy developing, water pollution, resource depletion and many other environmental problems continue to emerge. Steady state of water ecological environment is an important part of ecological security. In order to investigate the regional water ecological security state, this study constructs a comprehensive evaluation indicator system with the framework of "Driving force-Carrying source-State-Management" (DCSM). The entropy weight method is used to determine the weight of each indicator, and then the weighted rank sum ratio model is introduced to classify the water ecological environment of Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2010 to 2019. Finally, the adversarial interpretative structure model is used to refine the ranking of each region. The results show that (1) The overall state of water ecology in the Yangtze River Economic Belt is at a medium level, with different regional divergent shortcomings in the upper, middle and lower basins. (2) Regional differences are obvious. The overall performance of the upper reaches is stronger than the middle and lower reaches and it can also founded that Zhejiang and Jiangsu present certain particularities which can be concluded as follow: the regions which consider traditional industrialization as the main development path perform worse. (3) It can be seen that from the sub-system level, the carrying state and water ecological management sub-system is highly correlated with the quality of water ecological environment. Therefore, in the future, it is necessary to pay attention to the overall water ecological safety in the basin and promote the sustainable development of water ecology. KeywordsWater ecological environment • The entropy weight method • The weighted rank sum ratio model • The adversarial interpretative structure model • Evaluation • The Yangtze River Economic Belt

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