Long‐Term Coevolution of an Urban Human‐Water System Under Climate Change: Critical Role of Human Adaptive Actions

Abstract

The impacts of climate change and human activities are challenging water sustainability in many cities around the world. Advanced understanding of the future long‐term coevolution of coupled urban human‐water systems is of considerable interest in this context. This study uses a previously developed sociohydrologic model to explore the coevolutionary trajectories of Beijing City's human‐water system over the 2015–2099 period under possible climate changes. The effects of multiple human adaptive actions under alternative climate scenarios are investigated in particular. Results show that there might be a recurrent competition for water between humans and the natural environment (e.g., groundwater aquifer) in the long‐term future, indicating that effective water management needs to ensure that this competition remains within a safe operating space. Three regimes of the human‐environment competition are revealed, including a sustainable development regime in which human society and groundwater aquifer are both safe throughout their coevolutionary trajectories, a regime that may lead to severe population loss due to overaggressive population control actions, and a regime that may cause aquifer depletion due to under‐perception of the drawdown of groundwater table. Results also show that relying too much on interbasin water diversion project might slacken human water conservation measures and eventually cause more severe aquifer depletion in the long run. Maintaining a high community sensitivity to drawdown of groundwater table and moderate measures to control population growth are keys to avoid unintended, negative consequences.

Spatio-Temporal Change of Multiple Ecosystem Services and Their Driving Factors: A Case Study in Beijing, China

“…Many studies have shown that global warming intensifies the ecological impact of climate change and poses a nonnegligible Forests 2022, 13, 260 2 of 16 threat to human survival [14]. For example, under the dual effect of climate change and human activities, many cities around the world are facing water crises [15].…”

A Systematic Review of Spatial-Temporal Scale Issues in Sociohydrology

“…There have been rapid global changes in land use and land management along with increasing water demands (Kumar et al, 2020). These changes have modified the hydrologic cycle at every scale resulting in the transformation of the landscape's hydrology around the world, significantly impacting societal development and ecosystem quality (Blair and Buytaert, 2015;Kumar et al, 2020;Li and Sivapalan, 2020). Sustainable water resource management is a critical component of food and energy production that is required to meet human demands (Roobavannan et al, 2018).…”

“…Recent studies in the field of sociohydrology include a range of objectives and goals, but are united in a multidimensional, interdisciplinary effort with the aim of establishing generalizable models that hold across time at a global scale (Pande and Sivapalan, 2017;Sanderson, 2018;Di Baldassarre et al, 2019). Modeling sociohydrological systems is inherently difficult because these systems operate at multiple scales, both spatial and temporal, and because of the uncertainty associated with predicting and assessing human activities along with climate change (Li and Sivapalan, 2020;Stephens et al, 2021). Moreover, as the world becomes increasingly globalized, leading to increasingly interconnected sociohydrological systems, there is a need to extend sociohydrology to the space-time domain in order to continue to be able to model and understand real world sociohydrological issues, which implies significant challenges (Pande and Sivapalan, 2017).…”

Groundwater Vulnerability in a Megacity Under Climate and Economic Changes: A Coupled Sociohydrological Analysis

“…Population size is an endogenous variable in the model, the dynamics of which are influenced by the drawdown of the groundwater table. B. Li and Sivapalan (2020) further explored the critical roles of human adaptive actions in the coevolution of groundwater and population. However, there remains a lack of understanding of the system dynamics under future environmental change and possible pathways that need to be invoked to adapt to the changing environment.…”