Vegetation greening weakened the capacity of water supply to China's South-to-North Water Diversion Project

Recent climate change and vegetation greening have important implications for global terrestrial hydrological cycles and other ecosystem functions, raising concerns about the watershed water supply capacity for large water diversion projects. To address this emerging concern, we built a hybrid model based on the Coupled Carbon and Water (CCW) and Water Supply Stress Index (WaSSI) models and conducted a case study on the upper Han River basin (UHRB) in Central China that serves as the water source area to the middle route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP). Significant vegetation greening occurred in the UHRB during 2001–2018, largely driven by the widespread afforestation in the region, with the normalized difference vegetation index increasing at a rate of 0.5±0.1 % yr−1 (p<0.05) but with no significant trends in climate during the same period (albeit with large interannual variability). Annual water yield greatly decreased, and vegetation greening alone induced a significant decrease in water yield of 3.2±1.0 mm yr−1 (p<0.05). Vegetation greening could potentially reduce the annual water supply by 7.3 km3 on average, accounting for 77 % of the intended annual water diversion volume of the SNWDP. Although vegetation greening can bring enormous ecosystem goods and services (e.g., carbon sequestration and water quality improvement), it could aggravate the severity of hydrological drought. Our analysis indicated that vegetation greening in the UHRB reduced about a quarter of water yield on average during drought periods. Given the future warming and drying climate is likely to continue to raise evaporative demand and exert stress on water availability, the potential water yield decline induced by vegetation greening revealed by our study needs to be taken into account in the water resources management over the UHRB while reaping other benefits of forest protection and ecological restoration.