Identifying Administrative Villages with an Urgent Demand for Rural Domestic Sewage Treatment at the County Level: Decision Making from China Wisdom

Rural domestic sewage management is a crucial pathway for achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6 targets. Addressing the crucial challenge of prioritizing administrative villages for rural domestic sewage treatment at the county scale requires dedicated planning. However, county-level comprehensive evaluation models designed specifically for this purpose are currently limited. To address this gap, we developed a model based on 13 evaluation indicators encompassing village distribution characteristics, villager demographics, rural economic levels, and sanitation facility conditions. To gauge the varying emphasis on these factors by different groups, a questionnaire survey was conducted among experts, enterprises, and government departments involved in the rural sewage sector in China. Two counties from distinct regions were then chosen to validate these models. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) coupled with the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method was employed to rank the importance of the factors and determine the prioritization of rural domestic sewage management in each area. The model results indicated that priority should be given to the county government, township government, ecologically sensitive areas, and administrative villages near tourist attractions in the two selected empirical counties for governance. A sensitivity analysis showed that altitude consistently exhibited high sensitivity in influencing the ranking results across all scenarios (0.4–0.6). In addition, the empirical results obtained were largely consistent with the priorities of local governments. The proposed framework offers a practical application for decision-making systems in rural domestic sewage management at the county level, providing theoretical support and scientific strategies. This holds great significance for achieving SDG 6.