Abstract
Watershed ecological compensation has been widely accepted as a system to promote the cooperation of various stakeholders to solve the problem of transboundary water pollution, but the existing research does not fully consider the impact of compensation fee paid by different governments on stakeholders’ decision-making. Therefore, this paper constructs a tripartite game model between upstream governments, downstream governments, and the central government by using evolutionary game theory and determines the influence of different factors on the decision-making process of each player through simulation. The results show the following: (1) the initial probability significantly affects the decision-making behavior of each player; (2) daily supervision of the central government and the reduction of the environmental protection cost can promote the implementation of watershed ecological compensation; (3) the fine to downstream governments makes the decisions of the central government and downstream governments change periodically; and (4) the increase of ecological compensation fee urges downstream governments to choose noncompensation, and compensation fee paid by the central government has a critical value.
Highlights
As the birthplace of human social civilization, watershed is one of the main sources of human available freshwater resources and an important part of natural ecosystem [1]
It can be observed that the time for upstream governments and downstream governments to reach a stable state is shorter, while the time for the central government to reach a stable state is longer
In the high probability group, the initial probability of the central government has experienced a change process of first decreasing and increasing, which indicates that the central government initially tends to choose random inspection and turns to daily supervision
Summary
As the birthplace of human social civilization, watershed is one of the main sources of human available freshwater resources and an important part of natural ecosystem [1]. With the rapid development of social economy, the destruction of watershed ecosystem and water pollution are becoming more and more serious [2]. Due to the mobility of water resources, the pollution generated by upstream is transferred to downstream, resulting in the destruction of the ecological environment of the whole basin [3, 4]. Erefore, how to effectively solve the problem of transboundary water pollution has become the focus of governments and scholars. Because different regions in the basin have different needs, in order to maximize their own interests, upstream and downstream areas often have interest conflicts around the development, distribution, and utilization of water resources, resulting in the “tragedy of the commons” [6]. Payment for watershed ecosystem services (PWES), as an effective system that can promote the cooperation of upstream and downstream areas to protect watershed
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