Research On Urban Water Inclusive Sustainability And Coupling Coordination Mechanism In The Yangtze River Economic Belt

The World Bank and the United Nations have adopted inclusive growth as an important strategy to guide the development of countries.In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development announced by the United Nations,one of its goals is to build inclusive,safe,resilient and sustainable cities.The core of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development signed by Chinese President Xi Jinping is also inclusive growth,in which guaranteeing everyone's access to water resources and the ecological environment.It can be seen that the water inclusiveness is closely related to the urban water sustainable development.The Yangtze River Economic Belt(YREB)is an important national strategic development area in China.The cities along the Yangtze River,as key carriers of “oneaxis,two-wing,three-pole and multi-point” in the YREB,their development and 500 million people's lives in the YREB are closely related to water resources.They are playing an extremely important role in promoting the coordinated and high-quality development of the upper,middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River,under the background of ecological priority and green development.Moreover,heavy water consumption and polluting industries such as coal,chemicals and papermaking are gathered along the Yangtze River,which poses a major threat to the drinking water of urban residents in the YREB.The imbalance and uncoordination of regional development(such as poverty,employment or welfare,lack of infrastructure,clean water supply,and other social equity issues)have further aggravated the contradiction between supply and demand of urban water resources and the difficulty of water resources management.Science and technology play a limited role in the development and utilization of water resources and the control of water pollution.Deterioration of the water ecological environment is becoming the main bottleneck restricting the sustainable development of the YREB,and traditional sustainable development cannot fully meet the needs of development.As a result,it is urgent to solve the problems of inclusive sustainability of water resources and coordinated development between cities in the YREB.Inclusive growth emphasizes that everyone can participate in the growth process fairly and benefit from it.In order to achieve effectiveness and fairness in water resources sustainable development of the cities along the Yangtze River in the YREB,special attention should be paid to inclusive growth,not only economic development.We must adhere to the guidelines of people-oriented,high-quality development,environmental friendliness,science and technology development and incorporate the three pillars of sustainable development(economy,society and environment),and technological innovation.Therefore,it is necessary to integrate the concept of inclusive growth and sustainable development into the research of urban water resources.To this end,a new concept of urban water inclusive sustainability(UWIS)is developed to explore the inclusive sustainablity of urban water resources and the coupling coordination mechanism in this study.The following questions have arisen and are also puzzling water resources researchers and policymakers:1)How can inclusive sustainability of water resources be characterized at the prefecture-level city?2)How to find the scientific evaluation method in order to measure inclusive sustainability of water resources of cities in the YREB?3)How to reveal the coupling coordination effect between the five major subsystems and their temporal-spatial evolution trend? And how to identify the key factors that hinder the inclusive sustainability of water resources of cities in the YREB?4)How to explore the future development paths of coupling coordination of urban water inclusive sustainability through scenario simulation?Regarding the existing researches,myriad studies have investigated the carrying capacity or sustainable utilization of Chinese water resources,yet few to none have looked at the inclusive sustainable development of water resources.Scholars mostly focused on the researches of inclusive growth,the indicator system and evaluation of carrying capacity of water resources,and less on the establishment of a theoretical framework and evaluating system for the inclusive sustainablility of water resources that integrate inclusiveness and sustainability,especially on systematic studies of methodology improvement,integrated evaluation and coupling coordination mechanism.The holistic approach for sustainability is not fully considering the contribution of scientific and technological progress,even less for social equity,and rarely considering green water and gray water footprints.In addition,most predecessors conducted empirical research along a river basin or at the provincial level,while the theoretical and empirical research at three levels of cities,urban agglomerations,and river basins is quite rare in this regard.In this dissertation,the author will take this as the starting point to carry out the research.The purpose of this study is to establish a theoretical framework and a coupling coordination mechanism for the inclusive sustainability of urban water resources.Specifically,38 prefecture-level cities in the YREB,as an important national strategic development area in China,are selected as the research object.The theories of system science,inclusive growth,water footprint and sustainable development,are applied to establish the theoretical framework,indicator system,integrating evaluation method,coupling coordination mechanism and obstacle diagnosis,as well as optimal path and policy recommendations for the coordinated development of water resources,from the perspective of theory,methodology and application.The main contents of this study include:1)The water footprints of 38 cities in the YREB from 2008 to 2018 are measured.The temporal-spatial evolution of urban water footprint and inter-city differentiation are also analyzed;2)The new concept of urban water inclusive sustainability(UWIS)is proposed and the connotation is scientifically defined;the theoretical framework of ASFII and a five-dimensional evaluation system are developed;3)A suitable integrated evaluation method for the measurement of the UWIS is found out,which is used to measure the UWIS of 38 prefecture-level cities in the YREB;4)The characteristics of the temporal-spatial evolution of the coupling coordination among the five subsystems of the UWIS are described and key factors that hinder the UWIS are identified;5)The self-organizing feature map(SOM)is employed to cluster 38 cities in the YREB.And the optimal paths for the coordinated development of water resources in different types of cities through scenario simulation are performed.The main research conclusions of this study are:1)From the measurment of the water footprints,it is found that the total water footprints of 38 cities in the YREB showed a descending trend from west to east from2008 to 2018,with the largest proportion of water footprint in agriculture,followed by the industry;the per capita water footprint from high to low is: MRYRUA(middle reaches of the Yangtze River urban agglomeration)> YRDUA(Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration)> CCUA(Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration);the water footprint intensity is in descending order as: MRYRUA >CCUA > YRDUA.2)The UWIS is a new concept integrating the ideas of availability,sustainability,friendliness,inclusiveness and innovation of water resources,and stressing five perspectives of water resources endowment,high-quality development,environmental friendliness,people-oriented and science and technology development.The conceptual framework of ASFII proposed in this study,is centered on the three pillars of sustainable development and the idea of inclusive growth,fully considering the contribution of scientific and technological progress.The indicator of water footprint is enclosed in the corresponding evaluation system,including five criteria,14 elements,and 36 indicators.3)Through integrated evaluation using EM-AGA-EAHP-GRA-TOPSIS,the results indicate that the overall UWIS of 38 cities in the YREB showed a slight upward trend,basically at a medium level from 2008 to 2018 and a friendliness > sustainability >inclusiveness > availability > innovation index.The UWIS from high to low is:YRDUA > MRYRUA > CCUA.4)The 38 cities in the YREB are in low-level coordination from 2008 to 2018,and their temporal characteristics showed a trend of economy > water resources > science and technology > environment > societal system,YRDUA > MRYRUA > CCUA.The spatial differentiation is manifested as high in the east and low in the west,evolving from mild and low to moderate and high coordination on the whole.The analysis of obstacle factors proved that obstacle degree of each subsystem in the descending order as: water resources > society > economy > science and technology > environment system.The main obstacle factors come from 12 factors such as the water resources utilization rate,drainage pipe length per 10,000 persons,water footprint intensity,and etc.5)The findings of scenario simulation declare that the optimal paths for coupling coordination of the four types of cities are differentiated and will develop along different paths.Based on the research results in this study,some suggestions are put forward for the improvement of the UWIS and the coupling coordination mechanism,from the different levels of the Yangtze River Economic Belt,the three major urban agglomerations,and the four types of cities.From the perspective of theoretical level,this study introduces the concept of water footprint including blue water,green water,and gray water footprints.The ASFII conceptual framework and a five-dimensional indicator system of the UWIS are developed.From the perspective of methodological levels,an integrated evaluation method is developed to comprehensively and scientifically measure the UWIS.Through self-organizing feature map,scenario simulation and other medthods,this study scientifically elaborates its coupling coordination mechanism.The main innovative contributions of this study are as follows:1)Unique perspective of research: Differing from the existing water resources carrying capacity and sustainability,a new concept of urban water inclusive sustainability(UWIS)in this study is firstly proposed,by incorporating the concept of inclusive growth and sustainable development into the research of urban water resources.The UWIS is a new concept integrating the ideas of availability,sustainability,friendliness,inclusiveness and innovation of water resources,and stressing five perspectives of water resources endowment,high-quality development,environmental friendliness,people-oriented and science and technology development,which expands the connotation of water resource efficiency and carrying capacity.It opens a new perspective for the researches on urban water resources sustainability,that is,water resources management should be carried out under the paradigm of inclusive sustainability.2)Innovative theoretical framework: The existing related researches are centered on the three pillars of sustainable development: economy,society and environment,not fully considering the contribution of scientific and technological progress,and even less for social equity.The holistic research for sustainability is rarely considering green water and gray water footprints.This study introduces the concept of water footprint,also incorporates the idea of inclusive growth and sustainable development,and highlights the important role of scientific and technological progress.The ASFII conceptual framework and a five-dimensional indicator system of the UWIS,integrating the ideas of availability,sustainability,friendliness,inclusiveness and innovation of water resources,are developed.The framework and indicator system can be applied to comprehensively and scientifically measure the UWIS at the levels of cities,urban agglomerations and river basins as well as provinces.3)Method improvement: For the weakness of the 9-value scale method of traditional AHP,an improved AHP method(EM-AGA-EAHP)is presented,which synthesizes entropy method(EM),accelerating genetic algorithms(AGA)and extended analytic hierarchy process(EAHP).Moreover,an integrated evaluation method EMAGA-EAHP-GRA-TOPSIS is developed,and its integrated algorithm is given and verified,which is used to measure the UWIS and five development indexes for 38 cities,the three urban agglomerations and the YREB from 2008 to 2018 in the perspectives of cities,urban agglomerations,and river basins.It offers a valuable reference and empirical case of evaluation modeling for the sustainable use and coordinated development of urban water resources in the YREB and other river basins.