Research on basin ecological compensation in the Yangtze River Economic Belt based on the three-way-decision theory

Abstract

Nowadays, increasing pollution problems in major basins in China are becoming serious due to the acceleration of urbanization, and transboundary pollution problems are particularly deteriorating. The pollutants generated by production in the upstream area enter the midstream area with water flow and eventually reach the downstream area, causing adverse effects on the local ecological environment and people's health and even the whole country. To address this issue, a basin ecological compensation model was established in this study. This model includes a series of indicators and parameters that may affect the government's revenue, such as subsidies or penalties. Compared with most other existing research results, the innovation in this paper and marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) In this study, we clarify the usual division of the role among the upstream, midstream, and downstream in basin ecological compensation. Introducing “the midstream area” expands a two-party evolutionary game into the three-party evolutionary game. This is very helpful to sort out the conflicts of interest among various stakeholders in the system. In addition, the model combines the three-way-decision theory to expand strategies that governments can choose in the game. (2) We draw inspiration from rough set theory based decision-making methods and introduce the three-way decision theory to handle uncertainty, forming three decision options: accept, reject, and deferment. This decision-making approach is more in line with the decision-making process of stakeholders in reality and can reduce the risks brought by uncertainty. The established ecological compensation model in this paper predicted strategy decisions of the upstream, midstream, and downstream governments on various emerging issues. (3) In empirical simulation, taking the Yangtze River Economic Belt in China as a case study, and Hubei Province, Anhui Province, and Jiangsu Province as main research objects, the feasibility and effectiveness of the model were verified through numerical simulation. The following conclusions are drawn in this paper: (i) The change in the initial probability of each government will not alter the final evolutionary result of the entire evolutionary game system, but will alter the system's evolutionary process; (ii) When the government tends to choose negative or deferment decision, other governments may be in a hesitant state in the short term; (iii) Changes in the initial conditional probability of Anhui Province will affect the decision-making evolutionary time of Hubei Province and Jiangsu Province when other conditions remain constant. This study provides an effective approach to protect the sustainable development of basins and improve related ecological compensation policies.