Impacts of climate change on water resources in the major countries along the Belt and Road

Panpan Du; Ming Xu; Renqiang Li

doi:10.7717/peerj.12201

Impacts of climate change on water resources in the major countries along the Belt and Road

PeerJ. 2021 Oct 12:9:e12201. doi: 10.7717/peerj.12201. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Panpan Du^{1

2

3}, Ming Xu^{1

2}, Renqiang Li¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ Sino-Danish Centre for Education and Research (SDC), Beijing, China.

Abstract

Background: Climate change has altered global hydrological cycles mainly due to changes in temperature and precipitation, which may exacerbate the global and regional water shortage issues, especially in the countries along the Belt and Road (B&R).

Methods: In this paper, we assessed water supply, demand, and stress under three climate change scenarios in the major countries along the Belt and Road. We ensembled ten Global Climate Model (GCM) runoff data and downscaled it to a finer resolution of 0.1° × 0.1° by the random forest model.

Results: Our results showed that the GCM runoff was highly correlated with the FAO renewable water resources and thus could be used to estimate water supply. Climate change would increase water supply by 4.85%, 5.18%, 8.16% and water demand by 1.45%, 1.68%, 2.36% under RCP 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5 scenarios by 2050s, respectively. As a result, climate change will, in general, have little impact on water stress in the B&R countries as a whole. However, climate change will make future water resources more unevenly distributed among the B&R countries and regions, exacerbating water stress in some countries, especially in Central Asia and West Asia. Our results are informative for water resource managers and policymakers in the B&R countries to make sustainable water management strategies under future climate change.

Keywords: Climate change; Downscaling; Global Climate Model (GCM); Runoff; Water shortage.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Project “Climate change Impacts and Adaptation in Major Economies of the Belt and Road” (2018YFA0606502) and the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China “The effect of local adaptation on modeling the spatial distribution of species habitats under climate change” (No. 41971060). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.