Resilience assessment of blue and green water resources for staple crop production in China

Hongrong Huang, La Zhuo, Wei Wang and Pute Wu

Agricultural Water Management, 2023, vol. 288, issue C

Abstract: Blue water (irrigation water) and green water (soil moisture), as natural bases in crop production, are vulnerable to natural and socioeconomic disturbances. However, quantitative resilience assessments of blue and green water for crop production are still lacking. Here we constructed a social-ecological based general water resilience assessment framework that distinguishes blue and green water for crop production in four dimensions, including resistance, absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity and transformative capacity. The framework was applied to quantify the spatiotemporal characteristics of water resource resilience for three staple crops (rice, wheat, and maize) at provincial level in mainland China over 2000–2017. Results indicate that water resilience related to crop production of China as a whole was at the lower-middle level over the study period. The green water resilience had higher initial performance, while the blue water resilience had a faster growth rate (>50%). The performance of adaptive and transformative capacity was 8.9∼153.7% better than resistance and absorptive capacity. There were significant heterogeneities in the water resilience score among crops and in time and space. Wheat had the highest resilience of green water, while its blue water resilience was the lowest among the three crops. The water resilience for crop production varied by up to 2.4-fold across provinces. Synergies and trade-offs among the four dimensions of water resilience were further evaluated. The current study provides an effective approach for assessing the state and progress of resilience of regional water resources for crop production.

Keywords: Water footprint; Social-ecological system; Resistance; Absorptive capacity; Adaptive capacity; Transformative capacity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377423003505
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:288:y:2023:i:c:s0378377423003505

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2023.108485

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().