Drought Adaptation in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China: Actions, Planning, Pathways and Barriers

Abstract

Abstract:The Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (NX region) of Northwestern China is threatened by increased meteorological drought induced by climate change (CC) and constraints on water supply from the Yellow River. Thus, the NX region is representative of attempts to adapt to CC and variability in China's arid regions. Field visits, a questionnaire and in situ inspections were conducted in 2012-2014 to understand people's perception and awareness of drought and its impact, particularly with respect to adaptation strategies. We mainly focused on drought adaptation actions and planning implemented at the government level under the double pressures of drought and allocation. We described a suitable adaptation pathway for socio-economic sustainable development and discussed existing adaptation barriers. Construction of modern efficient water-saving agriculture lies at the core of drought adaptation, with socio-economic sustainable development being the ultimate goal. To achieve this, policies and institutional, engineering, technological, structural and social initiatives and measures-classified into macro adaptation strategies and specific coping measures-are implemented. Adaptation often encounters obstacles, e.g., policy issues from household contract responsibility systems, funding difficulties of low-income farmers, traditional behavioral habits and low education and literacy levels among farmers. The adaptation pathway involves the construction of modern efficient OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2015, 7 15030 water-saving agriculture. Agricultural water savings are then transferred to developed industries, which back-feed socio-economic sustainable development in the NX region.

Development of a Wilks feature importance method with improved variable rankings for supporting hydrological inference and modelling

“…The landscape of the study area is characterized by an extremely flat surface, with an average slope ranging from 1 : 4000 to 1 : 8000, with mostly highly permeable soil (sandy loam). The climatic condition of the study area is characterized by extreme arid environments, with annual precipitation ranging from 180 to 200 mm and annual potential evaporation ranging from 1100 to 1600 mm (Yang et al, 2015). Initial catchment conditions were also considered in this case study to improve the model performance.…”

“…Such methods mainly include permutation feature importance (PFI) (Breiman, 2001a), partial dependence (PD) plots (Friedman, 2001), individual conditional expectation (ICE) plots (Goldstein et al, 2015), accumulated local effects (ALE) plots (Apley and Zhu, 2020), local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) (Ribeiro et al, 2016b), the Morries method (Morris, 1991), and Shapley values (Lundberg and Lee, 2017;Shapley, 1953). In hydrology, Yang and Chui (2020) used Shapley values to explain individual predictions of hydrological response in sustainable drainage systems at fine temporal scales. Kratzert et al (2019a) used the Morries method to estimate the rankings of predictors for a long short-term memory (LSTM) model.…”

Gaining Hydrological Insights Through Wilk's Feature Importance: A Test-Statistic Interpretation method for Reliable and Robust Inference

“…The landscape of the study area is characterized by an extremely flat surface with an average slope ranging from 1:4000 to 1:8000, with mostly highly permeable soil (sandy loam). The climatic condition of the study area is characterized by extreme arid environments with annual precipitation ranging from 180 to 200 mm, and annual potential 310 evaporation ranging from 1,100 to 1,600 mm (Yang et al, 2015).…”

Planned resettlement to avoid climatic hazards: What prospects for just outcomes in China?

“…This is partly driven by a joint UK-Swiss-PRC project called Adapting to Climate Change in China, now in its second phase. Articles about Ningxia claim that resettlement is an important adaptive measure for drought (Yang et al, 2015), but it is only very recently that these projects took into account the long-term viability of resettlement sites (Zheng et al, 2016). If there are vulnerability assessments, these are done at the county level (Zheng et al, 2016), which is inadequate for understanding vulnerability or informing planning in China because of significant inequality between and within villages.…”