Coordinated Resilience of Urban–Cropland–Population–Industry–Ecology Systems Under Water Constraints: Evidence from Nine Provincial Regions Along the Yellow River

Resource constraints in large river basins operate through interacting urban, agricultural, demographic, industrial, and ecological systems. This study develops a coordinated resilience framework for the Urban–Cropland–Population–Industry–Ecology (UCPIE) system using panel data from nine provincial-level regions along the Yellow River during 2000–2023. Coordinated and subsystem resilience were estimated with hierarchical entropy-weighted TOPSIS. Complementary disparity measures were used to assess interprovincial inequality and convergence, while relative shortage shares and indicator obstacle degrees supported structural diagnosis. Mean coordinated resilience increased from 0.2485 to 0.4107. Resilience in the Urban and Ecology subsystems increased rapidly, whereas Cropland resilience increased only marginally. The corrected Gini coefficient increased from 0.1740 in 2000 to 0.1983 in 2008 and declined to 0.1537 by 2023. The σ series indicated significant relative convergence even as absolute dispersion widened. The dominant shortage shifted from Urban and Ecology in the first stage to Population in the third stage, accompanied by a larger Cropland share. Per capita water resources and the proportion of effectively irrigated area reached obstacle degrees of 14.63% and 12.89%, respectively, in the third stage. The higher nine-region mean did not remove the provincial hierarchy, and the main internal constraints changed over time.