Distributive hydraulic engineering, cross‐scale landscape planning, and climate change resilience: On the water‐adaptive strategy in the Huai'an–Yangzhou Section of China's Grand Canal

Abstract

AbstractWater system plays a key role in the coupled human‐nature system, and ancient people's experiences to build a water‐adaptative way of life still shed light on human's pursuit for climate resilience today with their innate traditional ecological wisdom. In this paper, taking the Huai'an‐Yangzhou Section of China's Grand Canal, and particularly its hydraulic engineering system as an example, we show the system's success in addressing the multi‐dimensional challenges in a historical geographical context, as well as its landscape‐shaping power across the entire lower Yellow‐Huai River Basin up until today. Therefore, we argue that the system is not merely a hydraulic engineering project, but a cross‐scale adaptive strategy that has deeply impacted generations of people's way of livelihood with its intrinsic resilient nature. We attribute the success to the advantages brought about by the “distributive hydraulic engineering” approach, which is reflected in the ancient Grand Canal‐management, over the “master‐structure dependent” approach which appears to be the common practice in modern hydraulic engineering. For testing the hypothesis, we build complex system models representing the two approaches with the Qingkou Hydraulic Nexus as an example, and by running long‐term simulation, we evaluate the performance of the two approaches with respect to long‐term resilience. We show from a complex network perspective that the former has significant flexibility advantages, and outperforms the former in multi‐goal fulfillment capacities and long‐term resilience especially under a low‐tech, tight resource constraints condition. We conclude the paper with discussions on the implications of the findings, and argue that though with limitations, the traditional ecological wisdom as reflected in the Grand Canal case, with its holistic approach and flexibility design, still sheds lights on today's large‐scale hydraulic engineering projects that pursue a resilient solution for long‐term adaptive survival for the mankind.