Peer review

Open Access

Water, energy, and food are essential resources for humanity. The growing shortages of these resources and serious deterioration of river environments are having a big impact on the sustainable development of the economy and society in China. Water, energy, and food support human life and yet coexist in different ways, and therefore it is critical to find a way for all three key elements to be secured in order to support high standards of sustainable development in China. We used the criteria of stability, coordination, and sustainability of symbiotic systems to select 33 indexes that were then used to establish an index system. The weight of index was determined by using the entropy weight method combined with Analytic Hierarchy Process. The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was used to calculate the collaborative security index, which was the basis of our evaluation of the collaborative water–energy–food security of China in time and space. The results show that North China and Northwest China are at high water–food–energy security risk, while East, Central, and South China are at moderate risk. With the exception of Southwest China and South China, risk in most parts of the country has risen over the past decades, while it has fallen in Shandong, Henan, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces.

Text in English