Dynamic successive assessment method of water environment carrying capacity and its application

Water environment carrying capacity (WECC) is an important foundation of sustainable socioeconomic development and may be affected by many factors such as water resources, water quality, economy, population and environmental protection. This article focuses on the temporal and spatial variability of WECC to explore a method of dynamic successive assessment. First, the Pressure-State-Response (PSR) framework is used to develop a systematic and causal indicator system representing the three aspects of water environment pressure carrying capacity (WEPCC), water environment state carrying capacity (WESCC) and water environment response carrying capacity (WERCC). The Variable Fuzzy Pattern Recognition (VFPR) model and an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model are combined to successively and dynamically assess WEPCC, WESCC and WERCC, and after that the weighting method is used to calculate WECC. Furthermore, WECC is divided into 27 classes on the basis of WEPCC, WESCC and WERCC contributions. The proposed method is applied to the dynamic successive assessment of WECCs in China, including inter-province comparisons. The results show that the dynamic successive WECC assessment method is reasonable, and it can be used not only to accurately understand the changes of WECC through time but also to distinguish qualitative differences masked by similar WECC values. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.