Sustainable governance of drinking water conservation areas based on adaptive thresholds.

Drinking water quality is integral to the Sustainable Development Goals framework. At the present, China's drinking water conservation faces a number of challenges that are partially brought on by strict conservation measures that don't fully take into account human-land conflict and sustainable development. Taking the idea of adaptive governance, this study seeks to identify adaptive thresholds and adaptive solutions for compatible drinking water conservation and local development. Pressure and resistance to drinking water quality in its status, future potential, and adaptive thresholds were explored to identify sustainable governance for the Baimei Conservation Area, Fujian Province. Field research, local governance forums, and the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model were utilized to explore the drinking water quality pressure and resistance to drinking water quality. In order to uncover potential future changes in pressure and resistance, suitability analyses and multi-scenario simulations were used to examine the status quo, pressure, and resistance scenarios. Adaptive thresholds were then identified through SWAT modeling of each scenario to guarantee the drinking water quality is greater than Class II in the Core Conservation Area and Class Ⅲ in 2nd-grade Conservation Area, respectively. The research finds that construction land development and farming are the key pressures on drinking water quality, and forests and wetlands are the primary resistances. The expansion of construction lands and the increased wetlands was centered on potential future scenarios because farming has no room for growth and forests are already heavily covered. The adaptive threshold of construction land expansion is identified to be 10% without new wetlands but can be 20% by adding 10% wetlands in subbasins, 5, 8, and 9. This study confirms the potential of adaptive sustainability for drinking water conservation areas. A similar analysis procedure can also be adapted to enhance adaptive governance for the sustainability of other conservation areas nationally and globally.

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Territorial ecological restoration planning is a carrier process for carrying out territorial space regulation and ecological restoration. However, current urban planning efforts only focus on ecological processes, and fail to coordinate the development of both ecology and society. Taking Shantou, a city in Guangdong Province, as an example, we focused on the identification of ecological restoration nodes and the development of differentiated planning strategies from a comprehensive ecological-social perspective. By considering ecosystem integrity, we extracted the ecological corridors and key points by identifying ecological sources and constructing resistance surfaces, constructed an ecological recreation service evaluation system from the social perspective in terms of recreational allocation and recreational value to identify key areas for recreation services, and obtained different types of ecological restoration strategies by synthesizing the results of ecology and recreation. The results showed that there were 136 ecological corridors and 77 ecological nodes in Shantou, with a total length of 380.58 km. The most important recreation areas were the coastline, several inland bays, and wetland tidal flats, with an area of 33.78 km2 and accounting for 1.6% of the total area. Low-level recreation areas was the largest, accounting for 57.3% of the total area. We proposed the composite strategy of "recreation expansion & fishery development", the connectivity strategy of "ecological construction & corridor connection", and the protection strategy of "vegetation restoration & development restriction". This study would provide a comprehensive analysis path for the ecological protection and restoration planning of coastal cities, and would help promote the practicality and maximizing the comprehensive benefits of territorial ecological restoration planning.