Dynamic urban development reshapes water‒food‒ecology nexus priorities: Evidence from 335 Chinese cities

Abstract

The water‒food‒ecology nexus involves complex interdependencies, but existing studies often overlook multi-sectoral bidirectional feedback and cross-border effects. Using geographically and temporally weighted regression and spatial simultaneous equations, we analyse water‒food‒ecology interactions across 335 Chinese cities (2000-2022). Our results reveal persistent spatial disparities. Cities with high-performance in all sectors remain scarce (<5 %), with high-performance cities of water clustered in Southwest China, food in Northeast China, and ecology in key ecological protection zones. We find the bidirectional promotion between sectors accounted for 16.6 %. The degree of water resource exploration and utilization, serving as a critical leverage point, shows bidirectional promotion with the municipal solid waste harmless treatment rate in ecology sector. Additionally, sectoral conflicts, particularly resource competition between per capita water consumption and ecological water use efficiency, and land competition between agriculture and forests, intensify with urban development. Our further cross-border analysis reveals asymmetric interactions: high-income cities’ water overuse constrains ecological protection in lower-middle-income cities, whereas food production in the latter enhances ecosystems in the former. These dynamics highlight the need for differentiated governance that targets leverage points such as optimization of water resource exploration and utilization as well as cross-regional compensation mechanisms to address negative spillover effects. Our framework advances water‒food‒ecology nexus management by integrating multi-sector feedback and spatial spillovers, providing a template for global sustainability strategies.

Keywords

Bidirectional feedback / Cross-border / Promotion and inhibition / Urban sustainability / Water‒food‒ecology nexus

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Junze Zhang is an Young Editorial Board Member for this journal and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Min Cao: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Validation, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis. Yali Zhang: Visualization, Software, Investigation, Data curation. Junze Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Yuqing Xu: Software, Investigation. Ji Xu: Software, Investigation. Zifeng Yuan: Visualization, Investigation. Kai Wu: Visualization, Investigation. Yu Chen: Validation, Supervision. Min Chen: Validation, Supervision. Guonian Lü: Validation, Supervision, Funding acquisition.

Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the Key Project of Sustainable Development International Cooperation Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 42361144883 and W2412152) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 42271422 and 42271257).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100435.

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