Sustainable development in water-energy-food nexus perspective for the Yellow River Basin, China

The Yellow River is the fifth longest river in the world, flowing through nine provinces in China. The Yellow River Basin (YRB) accounts for about 8% of China's land area and 32% of population with significant status in energy and food sectors in China. Besides, the climate there is dry with shortage of water resource, the imbalance relationship between water, energy and food is an significant problem there restricting local environmental quality. Further, ‘The high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin’ has been put forward as a fundamental national policy for China. Aiming to investigate local Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achieving, from the perspective of water-energy-food nexus (WEF) analysis, this study investigates how WEF relates to the economy, public health, and the catalytic role of green finance with mechanism behind it. First, this study constructs a more comprehensive measure of WEF compared to literature providing a holistic assessment of the environmental potential capacity in the region. This study systematically explored sustainable related indicators that are relevant to the WEF to form an indicator system, and innovate utilize the combing weighting method AHP-CRITIC by which the coupling and coordination degree (CCD) be calculated. Moreover, Moran’s I index was utilized to check the spatial correlation of it. And the results shown that the degree of WEF CCD exhibited a pattern of initial decrease followed by subsequent increase and it is in the range between 0.7 to 0.8. In order to enhance the coordination of water, energy, and food sectors, considering the specific characteristics of each sector, the public should focus on infrastructure development, industrial upgrading, and technological innovation, respectively. And the decision-maker could hasten the planning and building of the western portion of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, which will aid in reducing YRB's resource competitiveness and uneven distribution of water. Second, for investigating the promotion of environmental quality, this study measured the local development of green finance more comprehensively via entropy weight approach, and then examined the influence mechanism of green finance on WEF CCD via industry upgrading, environmental regulation and green innovation simultaneously. Since the data is long panel, the full Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FLGS) tested to be appropriate and the results indicate a U-shaped relationship between WEF CCD and economic progress, while green finance can significantly promote WEF CCD growth. Besides, this study verified green finance mainly promotes local WFE CCD via mechanism of promoting industrial upgrading and green innovation, though the effect of green regulation was not found clear evidence to simulate WEF CCD. Therefore, further environmental regulation strengthening via green finance is more necessary to be placed in a prominent position. And it is crucial that provincial governments modify their green finance development strategies in accordance with the resources and features unique to their respective regions. Finally, motivated by figuring out the inter-relationships between environmental quality, economic development and public health, the multivariate analysis was carried out by using Panel Structure Vector Auto Regression (PSVAR) and the results revealed that the expanding YRB economic development mode was detrimental to the environment. The rise of healthcare expenditures would also negatively impact the economy and environment. Nonetheless, environmental quality was not a contributing factor to economic development and public health at the current stage. Policies promoting resource efficiency and coordination, clean technologies, and preventative healthcare practices could assist in reducing the negative environmental impacts while promoting long-term sustainability

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