Impact of Grain for Green Project on Water Resources and Ecological Water Stress in Yanhe River Basin

Abstract Grain for Green project (GGP) initialed by China government since 1999 has achieved substantial achievements accompanied with surface runoff decrease in the Loess Plateau but impacts of large-scale afforestation on regional water resources are uncertain. Hence, the objective of this study is to explore the impact of land use change on generalized water resources and ecological water stress using blue and green water concept taking Yanhe River Basin as a case study. Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is applied to quantify summary of green and blue water which is defined as generalized water resources, ecological water requirement of vegetation (forest and grass), agricultural water footprint and virtual water flow are considered as regional water requirements. Land use types of 1980 (scenario I), 2017 (scenario II) are input in SWAT model while keeps other parameters constant in order to isolate the influence of land use changes. Results show that average annual difference of blue, green and generalized water resources is −72.08 million m 3 , 24.34 million m 3 , −47.74 million m 3 respectively when simulation results of scenario II subtracts scenario I and it presents that land use change caused by GGP leads to decrease in blue and generalized water resources whereas increase in green water resources. SURQ in scenario I is more than that in scenario IIin all the study period from 1980-2017, green water storage in scenario I is more than that in scenario II in all the study period except in 1998; whereas LATQ in scenario I is less than that in scenario II except in 2000 and 2015, GWQ in 1992, 2000 and 2015, green water flow in 1998. Blue water, green water storage and green water flow in scenario II is less than that in scenario I in the whole basin, 12.89 percent of the basin and 99.21 percent of the basin respectively. Total WF increases from 1995 to 2010 because forest WF increases significantly in this period though agricultural WF and grass WF decreases. Ecological water stress index has no obvious temporal change trend in both land use scenarios but ecological water stress index in scenario II is more than that in scenario I which illustrates that GGP leads to increase of ecological water stress from perspective of generalized water resources