With intensification of human activities, environmental flow is often diverted for human use, particularly in areas with water scarcity. Accurate assessment of economic value produced by environmental flow will help protect environmental flow by means of economics. Based on the concept of opportunity cost, we can estimate economic value produced by environmental flow in water-scarce basins by the maximum loss caused by reduced amounts of water and the availability of water for other purposes. In this study, we propose a method that combined results of water scarcity assessment incorporating environmental flow with an opportunity cost approach to obtain economic value produced by environmental flow on the sub-basin scale. Then, we take the Wei River Basin in Northwest China as an example to test the feasibility of this method and use scenario analysis to discuss the influence of climate factor and land-use factor on economic value produced by environmental flow. This method can better present distribution and variation characteristics of economic value produced by environmental flow more directly and provide a reference for future ecological compensation in water-scarce basins.

随着人类活动的加剧，环境流量通常被转移给人类使用，特别是在缺水地区。准确评估环境流产生的经济价值将有助于通过经济学手段保护环境流。基于机会成本的概念，我们可以通过减少水量和将水用于其他目的而造成的最大损失，来估计缺水盆地中环境流动所产生的经济价值。在这项研究中，我们提出了一种方法，将缺水评估的结果与环境流量相结合，并结合机会成本法来获得由流域尺度上的环境流量产生的经济价值。然后，我们以西北的渭河流域为例，验证了该方法的可行性，并通过情景分析探讨了气候因子和土地利用因子对环境流量产生的经济价值的影响。该方法可以更好地直接反映环境流量产生的经济价值的分布特征和变化特征，为今后缺水盆地的生态补偿提供参考。