Comprehensive evaluation of the water resources-water environment-socioeconomic system in the Muwen River basin

Conflicts among water resources, ecological environment, and economic development have become increasingly prominent． Coordinating watershed economic development with water resources and ecological environments is a critical task for sustainable socio-economic development in China． Comprehensive evaluation is conducted in this study of the water resources-water environment-economic society (WEE) system in the Muwen River basin, to promote coordinated development and to support decision-making in basin planning． A multidimensional coupling evaluation system is constructed integrating Moran’s I index with the PSO-SVR model, to examine interactive evolution patterns of the WEE system in the Muwen River basin in 2025, 2030, 2035． Temporal evolution is found to exhibit a declining trend, characterized by “high coordination (pre-2012) → moderate coordination (2013–2016) → low coordination (2017) → moderate coordination (2019–2020)”． Regions with higher indices for the water-resource, water-environment, and socio-economic sub-systems are found clustered in densely urbanized areas． Overall coordination of the coupled system peaked in 2015 but declined across all regions by 2020． Obstacle-degree analysis reveals that chemical-fertilizer application intensity is the dominant influencing factor, the most significant obstacles are largely concentrated within the water-environment sub-system． Scenario predictions suggest that water resources index will rise to 0.689 by 2035, the water environment system will undergo a U-shaped restoration cycle． These findings will guide sustainable development and green watershed governance in the Muwen River basin．