Climate change and water resources: Case study of Eastern Monsoon Region of China

Abstract

This paper addresses the impact of climate change on the water cycle and resource changes in the Eastern Monsoon Region of China (EMRC). It also represents a summary of the achievements made by the National Key Basic Research and Development Program (2010CB428400), where the major research focuses are detection and attribution, extreme floods and droughts, and adaptation of water resources management. Preliminary conclusions can be summarized into four points: 1) Water cycling and water resource changes in the EMRC are rather complicated as the region is impacted by natural changes relating to the strong monsoon influence and also by climate change impacts caused by CO2 emissions due to anthropogenic forcing; 2) the rate of natural variability contributing to the influence on precipitation accounts for about 70%, and the rate from anthropogenic forcing accounts for 30% on average in the EMRC. However, with future scenarios of increasing CO2 emissions, the contribution rate from anthropogenic forcing will increase and water resources management will experience greater issues related to the climate change impact; 3) Extreme floods and droughts in the EMRC will be an increasing trend, based on IPCC-AR5 scenarios; 4) Along with rising temperatures of 1 °C in North China, the agricultural water consumption will increase to about 4% of total water consumption. Therefore, climate change is making a significant impact and will be a risk to the EMRC, which covers almost all of the eight major river basins, such as the Yangtze River, Yellow River, Huaihe River, Haihe River, and Pearl River, and to the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (middle line). To ensure water security, it is urgently necessary to take adaptive countermeasures and reduce the vulnerability of water resources and associated risks.