Evaluating the Collaborative Security of Water–Energy–Food in China on the Basis of Symbiotic System Theory

Xiao Li,Jing Liu,Zhenxin Bao,Cuishan Liu,Guoqing Wang,Yanfang Diao

doi:10.3390/w13081112

Abstract

Water, energy, and food are essential resources for humanity. The growing shortages of these resources and serious deterioration of river environments are having a big impact on the sustainable development of the economy and society in China. Water, energy, and food support human life and yet coexist in different ways, and therefore it is critical to find a way for all three key elements to be secured in order to support high standards of sustainable development in China. We used the criteria of stability, coordination, and sustainability of symbiotic systems to select 33 indexes that were then used to establish an index system. The weight of index was determined by using the entropy weight method combined with Analytic Hierarchy Process. The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was used to calculate the collaborative security index, which was the basis of our evaluation of the collaborative water–energy–food security of China in time and space. The results show that North China and Northwest China are at high water–food–energy security risk, while East, Central, and South China are at moderate risk. With the exception of Southwest China and South China, risk in most parts of the country has risen over the past decades, while it has fallen in Shandong, Henan, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces.

Highlights

Water, energy, and food are the basis of human existence, but as the population has increased and the global climate changed [1], societies have faced major challenges from resource shortages and environmental degradation [2]
The stability, coordination, sustainability, and collaborative security indexes of China’s water–energy–food system were calculated on the basis of the formulae in Section 2.7.2, and the quadratic fitting curve was drawn (Figure 3)
On the basis of the analysis of the stability, coordination, and sustainability of China’s water–energy–food symbiotic system, we found that all the indexes of the nine subsystems of the three criteria were combined to calculate the time series change of collaborative security

Summary

Introduction

Energy, and food are the basis of human existence, but as the population has increased and the global climate changed [1], societies have faced major challenges from resource shortages and environmental degradation [2]. Economy, and living standards have risen, so too have its food and energy demands [3,4], which require a large amount of water. China is short of water, and what it has is distributed unevenly in space and time. Its water and land resources do not match [5]. These problems restrict the sustainable development of China’s economy and society

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion