Ecosystem Services under Climate Change Impact Water Infrastructure in a Highly Forested Basin

Xupu Li,Zhuangzhuang Wang,Pengtao Wang,De Li Liu,Luwen Wan,Bin Wang,Junping Yan,Yingjie Li,Liwei Zhang,Patrick J. O’Connor

doi:10.3390/w12102825

Abstract

Climate change can have critical impacts on ecosystem services (ESs) and their inter-relationships, especially for water-related services. However, there has been little work done on characterizing the current and future changes in these services and their inter-relationships under a changing climate. Based on the revised universal soil loss equation (RUSLE), the soil conservation service curve number model (SCS-CN), and the improved stochastic weather-generator-based statistical downscaled global climate models (GCMs), we examined two important water-related services, namely, the soil conservation (SC) service and the flood mitigation (FM) service, and their inter-relationship under baseline and future climate scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5). We took the Upper Hanjiang River Basin (UHRB), which is the core water source area of the China’s South-to-North Water Diversion Project (S–NWDP), as an illustration. The findings revealed that (1) the SC and FM services will both decrease under the two climate scenarios examined; (2) the SC and FM services showed a significant synergistic inter-relationship and the synergy will be improved by 16.48% and 2.95% under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, respectively, which provides an opportunity for management optimization; (3) the ecological degradation in the UHRB will likely have serious consequences for the middle and lower reaches of the Hanjiang river basin, and therefore impact the actual economic benefits of the S–NWDP. This study points to the necessity for understanding the dynamic changes and inter-relationships of ecosystem services under future climate change and provides information regarding the consequences of climate change, which is useful for policy and infrastructure investment.

Highlights

Natural ecosystems are being affected by changing climate conditions through changes in ecosystem processes and ecosystem functioning [1,2]
The annual mean soil conservation (SC) was higher overall in the Qinling Mountain Region (QM) and DM highlands that were covered by forest than the grassland and Hanzhong–Ankang Hilly Region (H–AH) lowlands, where cropland, wetland, settlement, and unused land were occupied (Figure 2a)
A similar magnitude of the corresponding changing ecosystem services (ESs). This has been found in ecosystem service and inter-relationship pattern resulted under RCP 8.5, where the area proportions of the inter-relationship at climate-related research in southern California [2] and the Gandheswari watershed in eastern India significant and insignificant grades were 88.14% and 11.81%, respectively

Summary

Introduction

Natural ecosystems are being affected by changing climate conditions through changes in ecosystem processes and ecosystem functioning [1,2]. Synergies occur in situations in which two or more ESs increase or decrease at the same time, while trade-offs occur when an increase in the supply of one ES occurs at the cost of another. Both trade-offs and synergies may occur in response to the same driving factor [5] and they may change with changes in the ecosystem processes over time [6]

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