Comprehensive evaluation of water resources security in the Yellow River basin based on a fuzzy multi-attribute decision analysis approach

In this paper, a fuzzy multi-attribute decision analysis approach (FMADAA) was developed for supporting the evaluation of water resources security in nine provinces within the Yellow River basin. A numerical approximation system and a modified left–right scoring approach were adopted to cope with the uncertainties in the acquired information. Also, four conventional multi-attribute decision analysis (MADA) 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). Moreover, several aggregation methods including average ranking procedure, Borda and Copeland methods were used to integrate the ranking results, helping rank the water resources security in those nine provinces as well as improving reliability of evaluation results. The ranking results showed that the water resources security of the entire basin was in critical condition, including the insecurity and absolute insecurity states, especially in Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Ningxia provinces in which water resources were lower than the average quantity in China. Hence, the improvement of water eco-environment statuses in the above-mentioned provinces should be prioritized in the future planning of the Yellow River basin.