Impact of Social and Economic Development on Sediment Load of the Yellow River

Guangming Tan, Shasha Han, Yuecong Yu, Rui Hu, Yiwei Lv and Caiwen Shu
Additional contact information
Guangming Tan: State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Shasha Han: Key Laboratory of Lower Yellow River Channel and Estuary Regulation, Ministry of Water Resources, Yellow River Institute of Hydraulic Research, Zhengzhou 450003, China
Yuecong Yu: Power China Hebei Electric Power Engineering Co., Ltd., Shijiazhuang 450031, China
Rui Hu: Ministry of Emergency Management of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing 100054, China
Yiwei Lv: State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Caiwen Shu: State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-12

Abstract: Approximately 90% of the sediment yield of the Yellow River is derived from the Loess Plateau. In this paper, the Loess Plateau was used as the research object. To investigate the influence of economic and social development on reducing sediment load of the Yellow River, a mathematical method was employed with hydrological and sediment data from three hydrological stations (Toudaoguai and Sanmenxia at the Yellow River, and Ganguyi at the Yan River) as well as per capita GDP data from the Yan River basin. The results showed that the reduction in runoff in the reaches between the Toudaoguai and Sanmenxia stations accounted for 39.3% of the decrease in the sediment load of the Yellow River, and the other 60.7% of the decrease may have resulted from economic and social development. Using the Yan River basin as an example, there was an inverse relationship between per capita GDP and sediment delivery during the period from 1984 to 2018. Grey relational analysis revealed a relatively high relation between the sediment load of the Yan River and the number of rural laborers transferred from the area, the afforestation area, and the tertiary industry value of Yan’an city. Thus, economic development and social transformation are highly related to sediment delivery in the basin, which may result in a decrease in sediment delivery to some extent.

Keywords: sediment yield; economic development; social transformation; GDP; Yellow River; Yan River (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/14/7976/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/14/7976/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:14:p:7976-:d:595819

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().