AccScience Publishing / AJWEP / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/AJWEP025440339
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Comprehensive evaluation and application of synergistic pollution management strategies in the Yellow River Basin

Jun Zeng1* ,  Jie Li1
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1 Scientific Research Office, Shandong Vocational and Technical University of International Studies, Rizhao, China
AJWEP, 025440339 https://doi.org/10.36922/AJWEP025440339
Received: 28 October 2025 | Revised: 21 November 2025 | Accepted: 28 November 2025 | Published online: 24 December 2025
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

Synergistic governance is essential for addressing transregional environmental pollution challenges in the Yellow River Basin. To explore the effect of synergistic environmental pollution management in the Yellow River Basin, we constructed a four-tier index system—driving force, pressure, synergy, and effectiveness—using 2012–2020 panel data from nine provinces. A comprehensive evaluation was performed using an ecological niche suitability model, and a spatial panel econometric model was applied to identify regional spillover effects of pollution diffusion and synergistic management efforts. From 2012 to 2020, the overall effectiveness of coordinated governance in the Yellow River Basin improved from Level V to Level II. The evolution of governance levels across provinces exhibited noticeable spatial heterogeneity, with upstream areas generally exhibiting higher effectiveness than the middle and lower reaches. Spatial model results revealed a significant spatial spillover effect of cross-provincial pollution control, as indicated by the spatial Durbin model, which showed a significant spatial lag term (p<0.05). This suggests that pollution control inputs in one province enhanced its own governance efficiency and had a positive impact on neighboring provinces. In addition, robustness checks using the Bootstrap method supported the stability of the ecological niche suitability estimates. Multicollinearity diagnostics indicated no serious collinearity (all variance inflation factor values <5), and the key regression coefficients were statistically significant (p<0.01). This study proposes differentiated policy recommendations to enhance coordinated pollution management in the Yellow River Basin, including strengthening cross-regional collaboration mechanisms, establishing unified joint prevention and control assessment indices, increasing environmental inputs and technical support for weaker middle and lower basin regions, and improving ecological compensation and benefit-sharing systems to promote high-quality, sustainable basin development.

Graphical abstract
Keywords
Yellow River Basin
Synergistic pollution management
Ecological niche suitability
Spatial spillover effect
Policy recommendations
Funding
This work was financially supported by the Shandong Province Education Science “14th 5-year Plan” Key Project (No. 2023ZD086).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare they have no competing interests.
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Asian Journal of Water, Environment and Pollution, Electronic ISSN: 1875-8568 Print ISSN: 0972-9860, Published by AccScience Publishing
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