Identifying the decoupling pathways of water resource liability and economic growth: a case study of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

Identifying the high-quality economic growth pathways under the requirements of water conservation and water pollution reduction is pivotal to realize regional sustainable development. Combined with the theory of resource and environmental value, sustainable development, and environmental accounting, this paper innovatively introduces water resource liability (WRL) to measure water environmental pressure. This study takes the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) as the research area and firstly conducts a spatial–temporal analysis of the WRL change in this region from 2013 to 2018. Then, the Tapio decoupling model is used to analyze the decoupling states and the decoupling stabilities between WRL and economic growth in the 11 provincial areas and 3 sub-regions of the YREB. Finally, the main internal factors affecting the decoupling states are identified from the perspective of decoupling decomposition. The main results show that: (1) The WRL of the YREB increases from 173.36 billion CNY in 2013 to 201.62 billion CNY in 2018, with an increase of 16.3%, showing an upward trend of fluctuation. The WRL of the lower reaches of the YREB is generally higher than those of the upper and middle reaches of the YREB from both the provincial and sub-regional levels. Chongqing has the lowest WRL with an average value of 7.03 billion CNY, while Shanghai has the highest with the average of 28.74 billion CNY. (2) The decoupling state between WRL and economic growth in the YREB is generally stable. The decoupling state of the downstream is better than that of the upper and middle reaches, and the decoupling stability index is 0.59, which is the most stable. (3) The internal influencing factors between WRL and economic development in the YREB include structural effect, technological effect, and silence effect, among which technological effect with the worst decoupling stability is the main driving factor. The findings of this study are crucial for policy makers to formulate targeted policies to decouple WRL from economic growth and to realize sustainable development in the YREB.