Environmental and social benefits, and their coupling coordination in urban wetland parks

Abstract

As important and typical urban blue-green spaces, urban wetland parks (UWPs) have a variety of environmental and social benefits. However, existing studies usually focus on a particular UWP benefit and factors affecting it, so there is no comprehensive evaluation method and framework for evaluating UWP benefits and guiding their development. Through field survey, geographic information system (GIS), text analysis and an AHP-entropy method, environmental and social benefits of 38 UWPs were determined in Wuhan, China. Eight geographically weighted regression (GWR) models and three coupling coordination models were constructed to explore park attributes and built environment factors that affect UWP benefits, and to evaluate UWP coupling coordination.GWR models explained UWP environmental (Adj. R2 = 0.493∼0.777) and social (Adj. R2 = 0.419∼0.709) benefits well. Environmental benefits were more affected by park attributes, while social benefits were more affected by the built environment. Most UWP coupling coordination was medium (with CCD from 0.55 to 0.75, and an average of 0.630), which is caused by insufficient environmental benefits or uncoordinated environmental and social benefits. We built a framework for diagnosis, analysis, and improvement that can quickly evaluate UWP benefits, put forward development suggestions to promote UWP coordinated development so that UWPs will bring more well-being to residents. In the future, UWP benefit evaluation frameworks can be further enriched by more potential benefits and and promoted to improve more extensive urban blue-green spaces.