Impacts of Climate Change and Land Use/Cover Change on Regional Hydrological Processes: Case of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area

Xueling Tan,Yao Wang,Suning Liu,Yong Tian,Haiyun Shi,Jiping Jiang,Zhaoqiang Zhou

doi:10.3389/fenvs.2021.783324

Abstract

Climate change and land use/cover change (LUCC) have been widely recognized as the main driving forces that can affect regional hydrological processes, and quantitative assessment of their impacts is of great importance for the sustainable development of regional ecosystems, land use planning and water resources management. This study investigates the impacts of climate change and LUCC on variables such as streamflow (SF), soil moisture (SM) and evapotranspiration (ET) in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) by using Soil and Water Assessment Tools (SWAT) model under different scenarios during 1979–2018. The results show that the simulation performances were overall good, with Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency Coefficient (NSE) and coefficient of determination (R2) greater than 0.80 for the monthly-scale SF calibration and validation. According to the results of trend and change point tests of meteorological series, the baseline period (1979–1997) and the interference period (1998–2018) were determined. Interestingly, other land use types were basically converted to urban land, leading to a rapid urbanization in the GBA. Compared with the SF values of the eight estuaries of the Pearl River Basin in the baseline period, both climate change and LUCC has led to the decrease in the SF values in the interference period, and the combined effect of climate change and LUCC was slightly greater than their individual effect. Overall, climate change and LUCC both have important impacts on regional hydrological processes in the GBA.

Highlights

Climate change and land use/cover change (LUCC) are the two main driving forces affecting hydrological processes (Shi and Chen, 2018; Lamichhane and Shakya, 2019; Dosdogru et al, 2020; Guo et al, 2020; Wang Q et al, 2020)
Sensitivity analysis and automatic calibration were performed by using the SUFI-2 in the SWATCUP, which indicated that 10 parameters listed in Table 2 were the most sensitive
The results show that P-factor > 0.7, R-factor < 1.5, which proves that the simulation performance is good

Summary

Introduction

Climate change and land use/cover change (LUCC) are the two main driving forces affecting hydrological processes (Shi and Chen, 2018; Lamichhane and Shakya, 2019; Dosdogru et al, 2020; Guo et al, 2020; Wang Q et al, 2020). LUCC such as reservoir construction, irrigation abstraction, and soil and water conservation projects have a growing impact on the regional hydrological cycle (Iqbal et al, 2018; Xu et al, 2019; Yang et al, 2019; Zhao et al, 2021), especially under the influence of urbanization due to rapid socioeconomic development. Quantitative assessment of the impacts of climate change and LUCC on regional hydrological processes is of great importance for water resources management and sustainable development (Yan et al, 2018; Liang et al, 2020)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion