Comfort Value of Water: Natural-artificial Dual-structured Analytical Framework for Comfort Assessment of Regional Water Environment and Landscape System

The existing research on water comfort assessment has been limited owing to the lack of understanding of water environment and landscape system (WELs) and its comfort value. In this study, we propose a natural-artificial dual-structured analytical framework for more accurately understanding the comfort value of WELs. The developed analytical framework integrates the natural-artificial dual structure into a systematic index system by incorporating 20 indicators belonging to six dimensions. It combines the analytic hierarchy process, entropy weight method, and fuzzy evaluation method for comprehensive evaluation, which is relatively conducive in handling the variability and complexity of WELs’ comfort assessment. The assessment results show that the WELs’ comfort degree (WCD) in China has been continuously improving and the recent status is at a relatively comfortable level, which is crucial to human welfare goal. However, the water quality status, the development capacity of water engineering landscape, and the water culture and landscape tourism development have remained inadequate for a long time. Besides, the comfort level of hydrological climate is not promising and that of hydrological cycle has been getting worse under the influence of human activities. From the perspective of spatial distribution, the WCD in the south of China is generally better than that in the north. This study also sorts out the serious WELs’ problems in various regions, which could be usefully provided for reference to the relevant authorities conducting the long-term planning for human life improvement.