Comprehensive evaluation of water resources security in the Yellow River basin based on a Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Decision Analysis Approach

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, a Fuzzy Multi-Attribute Decision Analysis Approach (FMADAA) was adopted in water resources security evaluation for the nine provinces in the Yellow River basin in 2006. A numerical approximation system and a modified left-right scoring approach were adopted to cope with the uncertainties in the acquired information. Four multi-attribute decision making methods were implemented in the evaluation model for impact evaluation, including simple weighted addition (SWA), weighted product (WP), cooperative game theory (CGT) and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) which could be used for helping rank the water resources security in those nine provinces as well as the criteria alternatives. Moreover, several aggregation methods including average ranking procedure, borda and copeland methods were used to integrate the ranking results. The ranking results showed that the water resources security of the entire basin is in critical, insecurity and absolute insecurity state, especially in Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia provinces in which water resources were lower than the average quantity in China. Hence, future planning of the Yellow River basin should mainly focus on the improvement of water eco-environment status in the provinces above.