A study on the sustainable development of regional water resources-socio-economic-ecological environment-tourism industry: survey evidence from the Yellow River Basin, China.

This article focuses on the high-quality and coordinated sustainable development of water resources, socio-economic factors, ecological environment, and tourism industry in China's Yellow River Basin, a major national strategic region spanning nine provinces. It proposes an innovative macro-level assessment framework combining Quality Function Deployment (QFD) theory—a systematic approach originally from product quality management—with a novel G1-entropy value method that integrates subjective expert weighting and objective entropy-based calculations to evaluate indicator importance. The study constructs a comprehensive hierarchical indicator system covering water resources, socio-economic development, ecological management, and tourism, and applies the combined method with expert input to rank key factors influencing sustainable development in the basin. Based on the findings, it offers targeted policy recommendations addressing urban unemployment, environmental pollution control investment, regional GDP growth, water conservation, and tourism revenue enhancement. This integrated methodological approach aims to provide a robust theoretical and empirical foundation for policymakers in the Yellow River Basin and offers a model potentially applicable to similar regional sustainability assessments internationally.