LAUSR

Efficient-equitable-ecological (3E) regional water resource coordination that includes virtual water is critical for long-term sustainability. This paper develops a methodology for a comprehensive 3E evaluation of regional water resource coordination, in which both visible and virtual water are considered in the indicator system. Experts’ opinions towards indicator importance are expressed by hesitant fuzzy numbers. By using hesitant fuzzy linguistic judgments, the flexibility of expressions is increased. A minimized divergence and hesitant degree model is established to calculate the experts’ weights. Then to determine indicators’ weights, a weighted average operator is used. To aggregate the final evaluation results, a TOPSIS method is adopted. The presented methodology is applied to the water resource coordination evaluation in the Northwestern District of China. Based on the evaluation results, some suggestions are proposed to enhance the water resource coordination in the study area. Finally, to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, the method is compared with the equal weights method.