“…The Yangtze River and Yellow River hold profound significance as the nurturing lifelines of the Chinese nation. The development of YRB and YREB has garnered considerable scholarly attention, and a series of studies have been conducted on water-soil disasters and governance (Jiang et al, 2021b;Hu et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2023b), the impacts of climate change (Yang et al, 2023b;Zhang et al, 2023), the functions of ecological service (Pan et al, 2021b;Fang et al, 2021), education, healthcare and poverty alleviation and other livelihood issues (Zhou et al, 2022;Ren et al, 2023), etc. In recent years, the issue of HQD in both basins has progressively become a key focus of scholars, who have concentrated their efforts on formulating policies and delineating developmental trajectories aligned with the principles of HQD within the geographical regions (Chen et al, 2022), HQD of the economy and industries (Geng and Wang, 2023), HQD of construction, water conservancy, agriculture, transportation and other industries (Chen et al, 2023;Wang, 2022).…”