Green water efficiency in the vulnerable silk road economic belt

Frontiers in Environmental Science

Environmental Science

Hai Long¹  Qiang Zhang² 

[1] International College, Krirk University, Bangkok, Thailand;Xi’an University of Finance and Economics, Xi’an, China;

关键词: green water efficiency;    spatial heterogeneity;    vulnerable environment;    silk road economic belt;    DEA method;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fenvs.2023.1238175

 received in 2023-06-11, accepted in 2023-07-24,  发布年份 2023

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Introduction: In vulnerable environments, accurate and complete assessments of green water efficiency (GWE) must consider unexpected outputs.Methods: This study employed the hyper-efficiency SBM-DEA model and SDM method to investigate the spatial heterogeneity and the determinants of GWE, respectively, in nine Chinese provinces along the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB), which is characterized by a vulnerable ecological and economic system.Results: Using data from 2008 to 2019, this study found that the green performance indicator varied in these provinces; GWE showed substantial spatial heterogeneity, with a negative spatial autocorrelation among the provinces with a low-to-high or high-to-low distribution. The southwest provinces had a higher GWE than the northwest, but there was no significant GWE improvement in the whole region. Both governmental engagement and environmental protection were the most influential determinants of GWE, which showed spatial spillover effects, followed by water pollution then economic growth, demonstrating that the GWE in vulnerable ecosystems may be changed by any factor depending on unexpected outputs.Discussion: This study suggests that reducing the side effects of unexpected outputs in vulnerable environments, because the ecosystem will be redamaged by unexpected contaminants when improving the local GWE.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
Copyright © 2023 Zhang and Long.