Comprehensive Analysis of Coordination Relationship between Water Resources Environment and High-Quality Economic Development in Urban Agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of Yangtze River

Water resources environment and high-quality economic development both have crucial significance to sustainable development. To explore the nexus between them, an integrated evaluation system was firstly established in this study on the basis of their complicated synergy mechanism. Secondly, the index weights of urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River from 2008 to 2017 were calculated by project pursuit-entropy weight method (PP-EWM) combined with an immune grey wolf optimizer algorithm (IGWO). Finally, the static and dynamic coordination degrees of 31 cities in the urban agglomeration were measured by membership function coordination model (MFCM), and the temporal and spatial characteristics of the coordination degrees were analyzed. The results showed that: (1) most cities in the urban agglomeration still had some room for improvement in terms of the water resources environment and high-quality economic development; (2) according to the changing characteristics of static coordination degrees, 31 cities were divided into five types, namely constantly rising type, constantly declining type, rising-declining type, declining-rising type and fluctuation type; (3) the dynamic coordination degrees demonstrated that the number of well coordinated cities decreased in recent years, and Xinyu and three provincial cities (i.e., Wuhan, Changsha and Nanchang) had poor performances. Overall, this study contributed to decision-making on synergic improvement between the water resources environment and high-quality economic development.