Volume 37, Issue 3 e14853
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Forecasting the human and climate impacts on groundwater resources in the irrigated agricultural region of North China Plain

Haorui Chen

Haorui Chen

State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing, China

National Center for Efficient Irrigation Engineering and Technology Research-Beijing, Beijing, China

Search for more papers by this author
Mousong Wu

Corresponding Author

Mousong Wu

International Institute for Earth System Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

State Key Laboratory of Frozen Soil Engineering, Lanzhou, China

Correspondence

Mousong Wu, International Institute for Earth System Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China.

Email: [email protected]

Wenxin Zhang, Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Lund SE-22362, Sweden.

Email: [email protected]

Search for more papers by this author
Zheng Duan

Zheng Duan

Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Search for more papers by this author
Yuanyuan Zha

Yuanyuan Zha

State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

Search for more papers by this author
Songhan Wang

Songhan Wang

College of Agriculture, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China

Search for more papers by this author
Long Yang

Long Yang

School of Geography and Oceanic Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

Search for more papers by this author
Liangchao Zou

Liangchao Zou

Department of Sustainable Development and Environmental Science and Engineering, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

Search for more papers by this author
Minjie Zheng

Minjie Zheng

Department of Geology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Search for more papers by this author
Peng Chen

Peng Chen

State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, China

Search for more papers by this author
Wei Cao

Wei Cao

State Key Laboratory of Frozen Soil Engineering, Lanzhou, China

Search for more papers by this author
Wenxin Zhang

Corresponding Author

Wenxin Zhang

Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Center for Permafrost (CENPERM), Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Correspondence

Mousong Wu, International Institute for Earth System Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China.

Email: [email protected]

Wenxin Zhang, Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University, Lund SE-22362, Sweden.

Email: [email protected]

Search for more papers by this author
First published: 06 March 2023
Citations: 1
Funding information Key Science and Technology Project for Revitalization of Inner Mongolia of China, Grant/Award Numbers: 2022EEDSKJXM004, 2021EEDSCXSFQZD010; National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Numbers: 42111530184, 41901266; The Crafoord Foundation, Grant/Award Number: 20200595; the Open Funding of State Key Laboratory of Frozen Soil Engineering, Grant/Award Number: SKLFSE201914; W.Z. acknowledges fundings from the Swedish Research Council VR 2020-05338 and Swedish National Space Agency 209/19. This study contributes to the strategic research areas Modeling the Regional and Global Earth System (MERGE) and Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in a Changing Climate (BECC) at Lund University; Zheng Duan is grateful for the funding from The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning, Grant/Award Number: 2019-01296

Abstract

Climate change has caused significant impacts on water resource redistribution around the world and posed a great threat in the last several decades due to intensive human activities. The impacts of human water use and management on regional water resources remain unclear as they are intertwined with the impacts of climate change. In this study, we disentangled the impact of climate-induced human activities on groundwater resources in a typical region of the semi-arid North China Plain based on a process-oriented groundwater modelling approach accounting for climate-human-groundwater interactions. We found that the climate-induced human effect is amplified in water resources management (‘amplifying effect’) for our study region under future climate scenarios. We specifically derived a tipping point for annual precipitation of 350 mm, below which the climate-induced human activities on groundwater withdrawal will cause significant ‘amplifying effect’ on groundwater depletion. Furthermore, we explored the different pumping scenarios under various climate conditions and investigated the pumping thresholds, which the pumping amount should not exceed (4 × 107 m3) in order to control future groundwater level depletion. Our results highlight that it is critical to implement adaptive water use practices, such as water-saving irrigation technologies in the semi-arid regions, in order to mitigate the negative impacts of groundwater overexploitation, particularly when annual precipitation is anomalously low.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

All data presented in this article are available upon request.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.