Does vegetation greening partly offset increasing rainfall pressure? Risk assessment of the water erosion tendency in China over the past 20 years.

Author(s):  
Han Wang ◽  
Wenwu Zhao ◽  
Yanxu Liu

<p>Soil water erosion is a severe environmental issue which seriously damaging the sustainability of agriculture. Regional climate change could aggravate the threat of erosion, whereas vegetation greening in China (an increasing trend in vegetation cover) could act as a mitigation to the threat. On the basis of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation, we proposed a framework for performing an assessment of water erosion risk in China during 1998-2018. A contribution index was constructed to describe the influences of rainfall erosivity and cover management on water erosion risk changes in China during 1998-2018. The research objective was to explore the spatial pattern of water erosion risk change in China in recent decades and to identify the factor that has the largest contribution to the risk change. Results showed that: (a) The area with decreasing water erosion risk in China accounted for 34.97%, and the area with significant decreasing trends accounted for 20.04% of the middle and highly risky state areas. (b) The region that rainfall erosivity contributed more than cover management for absolute value accounted for 76.54%, whereas the contribution of cover management was increasing. (c) Vegetation greening can partly offset the stress caused by climate change. Water erosion risk in China decreased more than increased in risky state area. The pixels with cover management contribute more than rainfall erosivity was concentrated within the area where risk is decreasing, indicating a great contribution of vegetation greening to the risk mitigation. Consequently, enhancing the vegetation growth in the highly risky state water erosion region could reduce the erosion threat in China.</p>

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhili Wang ◽  
Lei Lin ◽  
Yangyang Xu ◽  
Huizheng Che ◽  
Xiaoye Zhang ◽  
...  

AbstractAnthropogenic aerosol (AA) forcing has been shown as a critical driver of climate change over Asia since the mid-20th century. Here we show that almost all Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models fail to capture the observed dipole pattern of aerosol optical depth (AOD) trends over Asia during 2006–2014, last decade of CMIP6 historical simulation, due to an opposite trend over eastern China compared with observations. The incorrect AOD trend over China is attributed to problematic AA emissions adopted by CMIP6. There are obvious differences in simulated regional aerosol radiative forcing and temperature responses over Asia when using two different emissions inventories (one adopted by CMIP6; the other from Peking university, a more trustworthy inventory) to driving a global aerosol-climate model separately. We further show that some widely adopted CMIP6 pathways (after 2015) also significantly underestimate the more recent decline in AA emissions over China. These flaws may bring about errors to the CMIP6-based regional climate attribution over Asia for the last two decades and projection for the next few decades, previously anticipated to inform a wide range of impact analysis.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 3704
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Karman ◽  
Andrzej Miszczuk ◽  
Urszula Bronisz

The article deals with the competitiveness of regions in the face of climate change. The aim was to present the concept of measuring the Regional Climate Change Competitiveness Index. We used a comparative and logical analysis of the concept of regional competitiveness and heuristic conceptual methods to construct the index and measurement scale. The structure of the index includes six broad sub-indexes: Basic, Natural, Efficiency, Innovation, Sectoral, Social, and 89 indicators. A practical application of the model was presented for the Mazowieckie province in Poland. This allowed the region’s performance in the context of climate change to be presented, and regional weaknesses in the process of adaptation to climate change to be identified. The conclusions of the research confirm the possibility of applying the Regional Climate Change Competitiveness Index in the economic analysis and strategic planning. The presented model constitutes one of the earliest tools for the evaluation of climate change competitiveness at a regional level.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 1563-1568 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher P. O. Reyer ◽  
Kanta Kumari Rigaud ◽  
Erick Fernandes ◽  
William Hare ◽  
Olivia Serdeczny ◽  
...  

2012 ◽  
Vol 40-41 ◽  
pp. 32-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Zampieri ◽  
F. Giorgi ◽  
P. Lionello ◽  
G. Nikulin

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chengcheng Ye ◽  
Yibo Yang ◽  
Xiaomin Fang ◽  
Weilin Zhang ◽  
Chunhui Song ◽  
...  

<p>Global cooling, the early uplift of the Tibetan Plateau, and the retreat of the Paratethys are three main factors that regulate long-term climate change in the Asian interior during the Cenozoic. However, the debated elevation history of the Tibetan Plateau and the overlapping climate effects of the Tibetan Plateau uplift and Paratethys retreat makes it difficult to assess the driving mechanism on regional climate change in a particular period. Some recent progress suggests that precisely dated Paratethys transgression/regression cycles appear to have fluctuated over broad regions with low relief in the northern Tibetan Plateau in the middle Eocene–early Oligocene, when the global climate was characterized by generally continuous cooling followed by the rapid Eocene–Oligocene climate transition (EOT). Therefore, a middle Eocene–early Oligocene record from the Asian interior with unambiguous paleoclimatic implications offers an opportunity to distinguish between the climatic effects of the Paratethys retreat and those of global cooling.</p><p>Here, we present a complete paleolake salinity record from middle Eocene to early Miocene (~42-29 Ma) in the Qaidam Basin using detailed clay boron content and clay mineralogical investigations. Two independent paleosalimeters, equivalent boron and Couch’s salinity, collectively present a three-staged salinity evolution, from an oligohaline–mesohaline environment in the middle Eocene (42-~34 Ma) to a mesosaline environment in late Eocene-early Oligocene (~34-~29 Ma). This clay boron-derived salinity evolution is further supported by the published chloride-based and ostracod-based paleosalinity estimates in the Qaidam Basin. Our quantitative paleolake reconstruction between ~42 and 29 Ma in the Qaidam Basin resembles the hydroclimate change in the neighboring Xining Basin, of which both present good agreement with changes of marine benthic oxygen isotope compositions. We thus speculated that the secular trend of clay boron-derived paleolake salinity in ~42-29 Ma is primarily controlled by global cooling, which regulates regional climate change by influencing the evaporation capacity in the moisture source of Qaidam Basin. Superimposed on this trend, the Paratethys transgression/regression cycles served as an important factor regulating wet/dry fluctuations in the Asian interior between ~42 and ~34 Ma.</p>


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