He Ruimin

Potential impact of climate change on future water demand in Yulin city, Northwest China

The objective of the paper is to assess the impacts of climate change, population growth and economic development on water demand of Yulin city located in Shaanxi Province of northwest China by using system dynamics approach. Total water consumption is divided into different sectors following the technical specification used for the analysis of water supply and demand balance in China. Water demand in each sector is modeled separately to compute the total water demand. System dynamics models for water demand forecasting are developed by considering the environmental (water quality, ecosystem preservation) and socio-economic (population growth, water consumption, policy and management) factors of regional water demand, and their nonlinear interactions with the physical elements of hydrological processes (natural runoff, groundwater recharge). The model is calibrated by using historical data and then applied for forecasting water demand in Yulin city under projected changes in climate, population, and economy. The study reveals that total water demand in Yulin city will increase from approximately 710million-m3 in 2010 to more than 1480million-m3 in 2030. Total water demand under A1B scenario which lies near the high end of the spectrum for future greenhouse gas emissions will be 2.51million-m3 more compared to B1 scenario. This is due to the projection of higher temperature by A1B scenario. It is concluded that Yulin city should adopt water demand management strategy to achieve sustainability in water resources.

Spatio-temporal characteristics and driving forces of annual runoff changes in northwest of China – taking the example of Yulin city

Climate change and human activities have changed a number of characteristics of river flow in the northwest of China. Numerous problems such as water resource shortage, drying up of rivers, water pollution are the direct consequences of these changes. In this paper, we used the example of Yulin city in northwest China to assess the spatio-temporal characteristics and driving forces of annual river flow changes. Our research was based on the long-term time series of hydrological data from 1956 to 2005, to analyse annual flow in four main rivers (Kuye River, Tuwei River, Wuding River and Jialu River). The river flow depends upon the runoff characteristics of the river catchment, therefore we used variation ratio, variation index, unevenness, Runoff-Concentration Degree (RCD) and Runoff-Concentration Period (RCP) to determine the change in runoff characteristics of the four main rivers flows of the Yulin city. We tested the tendency of runoff by the Mann-Kendall non-parameter statistical method to obtain the temporal evolution law. At the same time, Kriging spatial interpolation and GIS were used to derive the spatial evolution law. The dates of climate change (precipitation) and human activities were also used to calculate the driving forces for annual runoff changes of the rivers’ catchments. Through the accumulation curves and multi-recursive techniques, we built the correlation between precipitation and runoff. The driving factors for annual runoff change were then calculated by using the runoff coefficient method. Results showed that the distribution of annual runoff was uneven and had a small accumulation in July and August, especially in Kuye River, and there seemed to be a significant reducing trend in annual runoff. Isolines and the thematic map of Mann-Kendall tests U(R) revealed that the Tuwei Rivers catchment is the most affected catchment, with annual runoff substantially changed. At the 5% significance level, precipitation did not significantly drop compared with annual runoff. We also found that precipitation is not the only factor responsible for the decreased annual runoff. Therefore we included human activities affect in this case study by using the past 25 years land use, water conservancy and urbanisation data. We discriminated the impacts of climate change and human activities on the surface runoff by multi-recursive analysis method and runoff coefficient method. The results showed that human activities are the direct cause for the changes of river runoff. The results of the study also revealed that the Wuding and Jialu rivers had the most and the least changes in the runoff respectively; this phenomenon should be seriously considered for future water resources planning and management.