The Local Residents’ Concerns about Environmental Issues in Northwest China

Abstract

This paper analyzes public awareness and perception about current issues of environmental and water resources in China in comparison to the socio-economic issues. The ranking, Likert scale, and ordered logit analysis were applied to data from 1773 sample residents in northwest China. The results show that the residents rank the degradation of the ecological environment and water resources as the most important issue, and education, political involvement, gender, employment, and residential location play significant roles in explaining the observed differences in concern. Of the possible environmental and water resource restoration policies, residents ranked water quantity and quality, agricultural and industrial water use, erosion control, vegetation restoration, wildlife habitat, animal brooding and migration services, biodiversity landscape, and eco-tourism from one to nine in order of importance, respectively. The results are relevant for policymaking and imply that environmental restoration is a high public demand. Welfare gains from investments in it would be higher or equal to gains from other socio-economic and livelihood activities. Thus, public policies must emphasize restoring and maintaining a sustainable ecological environment.

Public Attitudes, Preferences and Willingness to Pay for River Ecosystem Services

“…The results also indicated that poverty reduction and infrastructure had mean values of 5.22 and 4.74, respectively and they were considered the least important issues. Due to considerable reductions in poverty [62,85] and the construction of infrastructure [86,87] in the last 45 years, poverty is no longer an issue in Northwest China but this achievement has been obtained at the cost of environmental degradation [64,65] and health risks [88].…”

“…The largest and highly sandy tributary of the Yellow River called the Wei River is located in the arid and semiarid region of Northwest China [61], as shown in Figure 1, where it flows through three geographical areas comprising the Loess plateau—Guangzhong basin in Shaanxi province and the North Qinling Mountains [62]. The Guangzhong area is located in the middle and lower reaches of the Wei River and it covers almost 135,000 km 2 (about 50%) of the entire river basin [55,63].…”

“…However, due to rapid economic growth and rapid urbanization during the last few decades, environmental issues are increasing because of the growing utilization of water resources [55]. According to the Wei River Key Governance Plan, the main ecological problems include the scarcity of water resources [66], land use and climate change [67], soil erosion and water loss [55], regional ecological environment degradation and water pollution [62]. Due to severe environmental problem and water scarcity, the average per capita water consumption is only 13% of the national average.…”

Naturalist intelligence and personality: An understanding students’ responsible environmental behavior

“…Environmental problems occur in many countries, such as India (Bhattacharyya et al, 2015), China (Aregay, Zhao, Li, Xia, & Chen, 2016), Vietnam (Nguyen, Lin, & Chan, 2019), and Indonesia. One city that has environmental problems in Indonesia is Bandung (Septian, Ruhimat, & Somantri, 2016).…”

Sustainability of Wetlands in the Eyes of the New Generation of Environmental Engineering Students

“…Like in many developing countries, water resources (e.g., quality, quantity, etc.) are the most severe and challenging issues in the Chinese public's eyes (e.g., [43]). Thus, this research explored this challenging issue through questioning a new engineering generation who will be involved in water-related projects in China in the future.…”