Regional Water Resources Security Evaluation Based on a Hybrid Fuzzy BWM-TOPSIS Method

Abstract

Nowadays, water resource security is becoming increasingly prominent, and this problem is a primary bottleneck restricting China’s future sustainable development. It is difficult to come to a unified conclusion on water resources security, and applications of highly feasible evaluation methods are lacking in practice. In this paper, a novel evaluation methodology is proposed for regional water resources security evaluation. First, water security is divided into two aspects: water quantity security and water quality security. The disposal rate of harmless household garbage, the excellent water resources proportion, and the functional water body loss proportion are creatively considered as indicators of water quality security in the evaluation system. In addition, a Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is used to evaluate the water security levels in different regions. For distinguishing the importance of different indicators, a Best–Worst Method (BWM) is employed to calculate the indicator weights, as triangular fuzzy linguistic sets can more flexibly describe the preferences of decision makers (DMs) regarding the indicators; therefore, it is embedded in BWM to determine indicator weights. Moreover, the fuzzy BWM-TOPSIS method is applied to evaluate the water security levels of six regions in North China, a comparison analysis with the equal weight TOPSIS method as well as the fuzzy BWM-AHP method, and a sensitivity analysis for indicator weights are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of this proposed method. Finally, some suggestions based on the evaluation results are given for effective and rational utilization of water resources in North China.