Carrying Capacity and Coupling Coordination of Water and Land Resources Systems in Arid and Semi-arid Areas: A Case Study of Yulin City, China

Quantitatively assessing the carrying capacity of water and land resources systems in arid and semi-arid areas is crucial for achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. In this work, taking Yulin City in China as a case study and employing the Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation (CRITIC) method, a modified model of coupling degree was developed to evaluate the carrying capacity of water and land resources systems endowment and utilization, as well as their coupling coordination degree from 2013 to 2020. Our findings indicate that the water and land resources of Yulin are diminishing due to declines in agriculture, higher industrial water use, and wetland shrinkage. However, reallocating domestic water for ecological sustainability and reducing sloping farmland can mitigate this trend of decline. Temporally, as the coupling coordination between water and land resources system endowment in Yulin continuously improved, the coupling coordination between water and land resources system utilization first decreased and then increased with 2016 as the turning point. Spatially, the carrying capacity of water and land resources systems, the coupling coordination degree between water and land resources system endowment, and the coupling coordination degree between water and land resources system utilization in Yulin exhibited the same pattern of being higher in the six northern counties than in the six southern counties. Improving the water resources endowment is vital for the highly efficient use of water and land resources.