Sustainable Watershed Protection from the Public Perspective, China

Chunci Chen, Guizhen He () and Mingzhao Yu
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Chunci Chen: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Guizhen He: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China
Mingzhao Yu: State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 7, 1-18

Abstract: The conservation and sustainability of the Yongding River Watershed attracted great attention as Beijing and Zhangjiakou jointly hosted the Winter Olympics in 2022. The government has implemented many management measures and restoration programs in the past decade. However, information and opinions from the public perspective were rarely considered. This paper investigates 626 residents neighboring the Yongding River Watershed through a face-to-face questionnaire survey to reveal public perceptions, attitudes, concerns, and behaviors toward sustainable watershed protection and proposes multiple regression models to explore factors affecting their concerns and behaviors. The results show that the majority of respondents (52–58%) have limited knowledge about the watershed environment, and their views are influenced by living places. More than half of the respondents (52%) believe that upstream should take responsibility for watershed protection, but 72% are not aware that upstream suffers economic restrictions. Public behaviors toward watershed protection are diverse depending on knowledge, attitudes, and concerns about the watershed environment as well as on sociodemographic background. Our results highlight that a better understanding of watershed protection can be used to foster public participation and increase support for watershed management initiatives.

Keywords: public perceptions; pro-environmental behaviors; public attitudes; sustainable watershed protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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