Domestic Groundwater Depletion Supports China's Full Supply Chains

Abstract

Groundwater is a critical resource that is under increased pressure around the world due to unsustainable exploitation for human water uses (Aeschbach-Hertig & Gleeson, 2012;Döll et al., 2014). China withdraws more than 100 billion m 3 groundwater annually (more than 10% of the global total) to support the livelihood and production activities of the largest population in the world and has been reported as one of the major countries depleting its groundwater resources (UNDP, 2006) according to both global and regional hydrological modeling (Fami-

Groundwater Depletion Rate Over China During 1965–2016: The Long‐Term Trend and Inter‐annual Variation

“…Pastor et al (2014) estimated that the proportion of EFR to annual flow did not show strong spatially differences over China. We assumed that 20% of surface water availability could be used to maintain ecological integrity, which was consistent with previous studies (e.g., Huang, Yuan, Liu, & Tang, 2023;Sun et al, 2022). Thus, the amount of surface water resources available to humans (WA s , m 3 year −1 ) could be calculated as the difference between total surface water availability (Q s ,m 3 year −1 ) and EFR (m 3 year −1 ):…”

“…However, this flux‐based approach separated water withdrawal from surface water and groundwater sources by the empirical assumptions as presented above, which showed discrepancies with the water allocation rules in the real world (Sun et al., 2022). Thus, we used the fractional share of groundwater and surface water withdrawal to bias‐correct the surface and groundwater withdrawal estimated by the flux‐based approach.…”

Consumption in Non-Pastoral Regions Drove Three-Quarters of Forage–Livestock Conflicts in China

“…We disaggregated the domestic final demand matrix to spatialize the consumption-based FLCs across regions. The final demand matrix can be disaggregated by using regional statistics, gridded population, or NTL data . Due to the data availability, we disaggregated the domestic final demand based on the NTL data, assuming that the distribution of NTLs in a certain province is consistent with that of the final demand.…”

Spatially detailed agricultural and food trade between China and the United States

“…For example, sub-national production in Brazil has been linked with the country of final consumption for beef [29] and soy [28,30]. Sub-national production data linked to trade can improve our quantification of supply chain sustainability, such as for embodied water [31][32][33]. Our study aims to contribute to this literature by developing, what is to our knowledge, the first large-scale estimation of high-resolution agricultural trade between subnational regions of both the receiving and sending countries.…”