Assessing the role of public attention in China's wastewater treatment: A spatial perspective

Abstract Of late, China has made significant strides in wastewater management. However, there is substantial variation in wastewater management across different regions in China. This study focuses on public attention, which is seldom discussed as an influencing factor of wastewater treatment, although it has increased in recent years due to the rapid development of Internet technology. Herein we verify that not only public attention related to wastewater but also wastewater treatment performance among provinces has stable spatial correlations. A Spatial Durbin model is used to investigate the impact of public attention on wastewater treatment. The results show that, for the local province, public attention will help improve wastewater treatment by promoting government to enact laws and regulations. At the same time, public attention in the local province will improve the wastewater treatment of its surrounding provinces, even if there are no regulations or public attention there. Therefore, the public could be a very effective supervisor of environmental issues. In view of these results, policy recommendations are proposed, which can be applied to improve China's wastewater treatment. In the future research, exploring the different impacts of the public's positive and negative attitudes will be conductive to evaluate environmental management in great detail.