Research on performance evaluation and obstacle diagnosis for urban water ecological civilization construction based on GFAHP-cloud-FSE model: the case of Shizuishan, China

With the increasing development of economics in China, the performance evaluation and obstacle diagnosis for urban water ecological civilization construction (UWECC) have attracted more and more attention, this study analyzes the coupling relationship between social economy and urban water ecology by applying framework model of "Driving force-Pressure-State-Influence-Response-Management", establishing the performance evaluation index system of UWECC. The group fuzzy analytic hierarchy process is developed to determine indicator weights and to find out the key influencing factors. A combination of fuzzy synthetic evaluation (FSE) and cloud model is introduced for measuring UWECC performance level. The integrated model includes two parts. One component is that fuzzy set theory is combined with evaluation methods, proposing a FSE method. The other part is that cloud model is utilized to make up for this limitation of ignoring the internal randomness and ambiguity for the FSE method. Subsequently, the UWECC of Shizuishan City in China is selected from 2010 to 2019 as a case study, the results show that its UWECC performance scores gradually increased in the past ten years, the growth speed of which can be divided into three development stages: bad and slow-growth (2010-2014), intermediate but slightly fast-growth (2015-2017) and good and fast-growth (2018-2019). Besides, through making sensitivity analysis of indicators to each subsystem, it is found that their sensitivities show obvious differences. In terms of the main obstacle indicators affecting UWECC performance, they also present obvious temporal heterogeneity characteristics, that is, the obstacle degrees of indicators in the same stage have slightly smaller differences, and those of indicators in different stages exist significant differences. The demonstration conducted proves that the proposed method can be used not only to accurately understand the changes of UWECC through time but also to diagnose the crucial obstacle indicators, providing theoretical basis for improving UWECC performance of this urban in the future.