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Coupling coordination analysis of China’s provincial water-energy-food nexus

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A Correction to this article was published on 15 December 2021

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Abstract

Water, energy and food are three essential resources for the socio-economic system, and they are interlinked. The coordination of their internal relations is worth studying. We conduct a coordination evaluation method to assess the water-energy-food nexus (WEF Nexus) in China’s provinces. By combining the coupling model and the coupling coordination model, we measure the comprehensive evaluation index and coupling coordination degree of China’s 30 provinces from 2005 to 2017. First, the results show the provincial comprehensive evaluation index had a slow upward trend. The comprehensive evaluation index of the southern region was higher than that of the north, and the eastern was higher than the west. Second, the coordination degree of WEF Nexus in China’s 30 provinces has reached high level in the horizontal coupling stage, and the overall degree of coupling coordination was on the rise. In 2017, the WEF Nexus coupling coordination degree of most provinces reached 0.700 or more, which was intermediate-coordinated. In the six years, the 30 provinces have experienced five types of coupling coordination degree: near coordinated, barely coordinated, primary coordinated, intermediate-coordinated, and well-coordinated.

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Funding

This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.71904203) and the Science Foundation of China University of Petroleum, Beijing (No.2462020YXZZ038). The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from China Scholarship Council. Humanities and Social Science Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (17YJCZH104).

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Lu Lin was responsible for research design and manuscript revision. Yingying Qi was responsible for collecting data, analyzing results, and drafting the manuscript. Arash Farnoosh was responsible for manuscript revision. Hui Liu was responsible for research design and manuscript revision.

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Correspondence to Lu Lin or Hui Liu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Communicated by Ilhan Ozturk.

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Qi, Y., Farnoosh, A., Lin, L. et al. Coupling coordination analysis of China’s provincial water-energy-food nexus. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 23303–23313 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17036-x

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