Assessment of the Ecological Compensation Standards for Cross-Basin Water Diversion Projects from the Perspective of Main Headwater and Receiver Areas

This paper aims to explore how to develop reasonable ecological compensation standards to improve the effectiveness of water diversion projects. Watershed ecological compensation is an important means to coordinate watershed protection and development and, additionally, compensation standard accounting is the core issue of ecological compensation. The previous literature has mainly calculated watershed ecological compensation standards from a single perspective, such as the main headwater or receiver areas, meaning the interests of another under-appreciated area would inevitably be ignored. The calculation results of different perspectives and methods vary greatly, directly affecting the implementation of watershed ecological compensation mechanisms. In this paper, the world’s largest water diversion project, the Middle Route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, was selected as the study area. The total cost correction model was selected from the perspective of the main headwater areas. The water resources input-output model was selected from the perspective of the receiver areas to evaluate the ecological compensation criteria and compare the differences between the two models. The results show that the ecological compensation standards based on the perspective of water source areas are mainly influenced by the ecological construction expenditures and industrial opportunity cost losses in the watershed, with higher compensation costs in the early period but a more moderate growth trend in the later period. The ecological compensation standards based on the perspective of the receiver areas increase with the annual increase in project water diversion, with a low compensation cost in the early period, but a faster growth trend in the later period. The ecological compensation standards calculated by different perspectives and methods differ significantly; the main contribution of this paper is to enrich the ecological compensation research on cross-basin water diversion projects from multiple perspectives.