Notice of RetractionSpatial Difference of Water Footprint Consumption in the Heihe River Basin of Northwestern China

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

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Sustainable development needs to consider the inequality between economic development and resource consumption and keep it within a rational range. Therefore, quantitatively measuring this inequality is an important and hot issue. Using the water footprint as the index of environment resource consumption, the spatial inequality of this parameter and the reasons for the inequality were analyzed using the Gini coefficient and the Theil index in the Heihe River Basin of northwest China. The spatial inequality of resource consumption was high. Decomposing the Theil index into urban and rural areas showed that spatial inequality was derived mainly from inter-regional inequality between urban and rural areas (this accounted for 61.28% of the total inequality). When the Theil index was decomposed into different sections along the Heihe River Basin (e.g., the upper, middle, and lower reaches), spatial inequality was derived mainly from internal inequality within the middle reaches (this accounted for 55.05%). Finally, regression analysis of the interrelation among the water footprint, resident income, and population Gini coefficients revealed that the water footprint inequality increased with rising income and population inequality, although the latter had a lower effect than did the former.