Harmony Assessment Indicators and Methods for Water-Human System Based on Synthesis Model in Weihe Basin

In response to a growing environmental crisis and to vast social inequalities in global development, we argue to adopt harmony development as a leading development model. The harmony assessment and harmony indicators can be powerful decision-supporting tools that foster harmonious development. In this paper, a set of evaluation indicators and models are proposed to assess the harmony level of the water-human system. Based on the concept of water-human harmony, authors established an index system with capacity to estimate water-human harmony, including 2 systems, 7 subsystems and 24 indicators. Employing Set Pair Analysis theory and Variable Fuzzy Set theory, the authors developed a model based on the variable weights (SPA-VFS-VW model) to describe the development degree of water-human system. The cooperative game theory was applied to set up a Cooperative Game Distance Coordination Degree model (CGDCD model). A novel harmony degree method (multi-criteria multiplicative synthesis model) was developed to assess the harmony degree. The derived models in this paper were applied to estimate the harmony degree of water-human system for a period of 10 years (2001 to 2010) in the Weihe basin. The results indicated that the values of harmony degree have a slightly decreasing trend ranging 0.597 to 0.696 in values. The assessing performance was compared with two assessment models to confirm the feasibility of the developed models and the reliability of the obtained results. This exploratory study also illustrates that the synthesis model presented in this paper can provide a practical and feasible approach to assess the water-human harmony. Assessment indicators and models provide the powerful decision-supporting tools for making environment strategies.