scholarly journals Evaluation of Groundwater Overdraft Governance Measures in Hengshui City, China

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 3564
Author(s):  
Yong Zhao ◽  
Lizhen Wang ◽  
Haihong Li ◽  
Yongnan Zhu ◽  
Qingming Wang ◽  
...  

Groundwater overdraft is a worldwide phenomenon, resulting in environmental issues, such as water contamination, land subsidence, seawater intrusion, streamflow reduction, and deterioration of the ecological environment. Located in the central North China Plain, Hengshui City has experienced a regional groundwater depression cone due to excessive pumping of groundwater, resulting in the largest overdraft area in the North China Plain. Since 2014, Hebei Province has adopted measures to realize the comprehensive governance of groundwater overdraft in partial areas of Hengshui City, including adjusting planting structures, promoting agronomic water-saving techniques, strengthening hydraulic engineering construction, and innovative management systems. These measures have been in effect for two years, such that their effectiveness must be assessed for the beneficial recovery of groundwater levels to determine the means for their continuation and extension. However, the change in regional groundwater levels is not gradual, but reflects a process of sudden increase due to the intervention of government behavior, and many existing groundwater recharge models are difficult to apply. Therefore, establishing a reasonable, scientific evaluation system of the measures is a key problem that requires a solution. Using field surveys and experiments, this study establishes a quantitative analysis evaluation method to assess the performance of governance measures adopted by Hengshui City in 2015, with full consideration of the crop water demand process and rainfall frequency. The results show that governance measures had a significant positive outcome on reducing groundwater overdraft in pilot areas. Approximately 98.4% of the agricultural governance target was achieved, with confined groundwater rebounding by approximately 4.92 m as compared to 2015. According to the analysis, the three most efficient measures (the top three largest amounts of groundwater-saved per mu) adopted by the government were (1) non-agricultural crops replacement (forestry), (2) planting pattern adjustments, and (3) integration of water and fertilizer-vegetable, which can be promoted in future measures. However, considering the size of the implementation area and total governance capacity, water-saving during spring irrigation of wheat and replacement by surface water are the two most important conservation measures, which are required to further strengthen the management and implementation effect.

Water Policy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongxu Shi ◽  
Xiqin Wang

Abstract The current water shortage crisis has necessitated an increased focus on improving the irrigation efficiency in groundwater overdraft areas. Consequently, the Chinese government has supported small farmers in installing community-based water-saving technologies (WSTs) providing high irrigation efficiency. Based on the data collected from 620 households located in the groundwater overdraft area of Hebei, North China Plain, this study conducts a stochastic frontier analysis to measure farmers' irrigation water use efficiency (WUE) and analyzes the impact of land fragmentation and WST types on their WUE. The results show that the average WUE of groundwater irrigation is 0.606. The WUE between community-based and household-based WSTs differs based on the degree of land fragmentation. A high degree of land fragmentation restricts community-based WSTs from efficiently improving farmers' WUE, whereas household-based WSTs perform better and are easier to adopt. For high land fragmentation, the WUE of the community-based WST is 9.12% lower than that of the household-based WST. However, the WUE of the community-based WST is 12.55% higher than that of the household-based WST when the degree of land fragmentation is low. Therefore, the government should pay attention to small farmers' adaptability toward WST and promote community-based WSTs on a low degree of land fragmentation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 1687-1700
Author(s):  
Li-chao ZHAI ◽  
Li-hua LÜ ◽  
Zhi-qiang DONG ◽  
Li-hua ZHANG ◽  
Jing-ting ZHANG ◽  
...  

2015 ◽  
Vol 522 ◽  
pp. 428-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaolin Yang ◽  
Yuanquan Chen ◽  
Steven Pacenka ◽  
Wangsheng Gao ◽  
Li Ma ◽  
...  

2002 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim R. McVicar ◽  
Guanglu Zhang ◽  
Andrew S. Bradford ◽  
Huixiao Wang ◽  
Warrick R. Dawes ◽  
...  

Increasing competition for water in China, due to industrialisation of its economy and urbanisation of its population, has led to the introduction of water-saving agricultural practices in an attempt to increase agricultural water use efficiency (Ag WUE). This study was conducted to assess whether changes in management practices have increased regional Ag WUE for a focus area covering 20% of the 300 000 km2 North China Plain (NCP). An ‘input–output’ definition of regional Ag WUE was used, where ‘input’ is the water available over the crop growing season and ‘output’ is grain yield. Regional databases of precipitation, irrigation, and yield from 1984 to 1996 were established in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to calculate winter wheat and summer corn Ag WUE on a county basis. For wheat, the average Ag WUE was 7.0 kg/ha.mm in 1984, whereas in 1996 it was 14.3 kg/ha.mm. For corn, Ag WUE increased from 9.0 kg/ha.mm in 1984 to 10.1 kg/ha.mm in 1996, although values >11.5 kg/ha.mm were obtained for both 1991 and 1992. Time series plots of the resulting Ag WUE, and its components, were generated to reveal spatial and temporal variability. Counties with a relatively high mean Ag WUE in combination with low year-to-year consistency have been identified as those with the highest potential for improving Ag WUE management. Total county water resources (WR) were also calculated for the time series, and county-basis normalisation of Ag WUE and WR also showed that there have been recent improvements in Ag WUE. For some counties in wet years, there may be an opportunity to plant larger areas of crop to increase county level Ag WUE. For the focus study site (and for the time series data available), it is most likely that recently introduced water-saving agricultural practices in the NCP are associated with improvements to Ag WUE.


2012 ◽  
Vol 599 ◽  
pp. 795-803
Author(s):  
Yan Pei Cheng ◽  
Jian Kang Zhang ◽  
Fa Wang Zhang

In order to study of the sandy soil use in the North China plain concerning land consolidation and water-saving techniques, the lack of sandy land groundwater resources, groundwater drainage of the land consolidation project due to a lack of resources basis, blind investment and consolidation benefits, also undermine the structure of the groundwater system. This paper took Wangyangxing village in Zaoqiang county, Hengshui City that first carried out, based on the water resource constraints of land consolidation project as example for site evaluation, and then the land consolidation of water-saving technology and the land consolidation process design theory was used. Hengshui City is one of parts of the sandy soil of agricultural land for a pilot study to explore the effectiveness of suitable sandy soil of agricultural land, land consolidation in the North China Plain for the full scientific utilization of water resources to improve the efficiency of the sandy soil land use and the basis.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 771-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Davidsen ◽  
Suxia Liu ◽  
Xingguo Mo ◽  
Dan Rosbjerg ◽  
Peter Bauer-Gottwein

Abstract. Overexploitation of groundwater reserves is a major environmental problem around the world. In many river basins, groundwater and surface water are used conjunctively and joint optimization strategies are required. A hydroeconomic modeling approach is used to find cost-optimal sustainable surface water and groundwater allocation strategies for a river basin, given an arbitrary initial groundwater level in the aquifer. A simplified management problem with conjunctive use of scarce surface water and groundwater under inflow and recharge uncertainty is presented. Because of head-dependent groundwater pumping costs the optimization problem is nonlinear and non-convex, and a genetic algorithm is used to solve the one-step-ahead subproblems with the objective of minimizing the sum of immediate and expected future costs. A real-world application in the water-scarce Ziya River basin in northern China is used to demonstrate the model capabilities. Persistent overdraft from the groundwater aquifers on the North China Plain has caused declining groundwater levels. The model maps the marginal cost of water in different scenarios, and the minimum cost of ending groundwater overdraft in the basin is estimated to be CNY 5.58 billion yr−1. The study shows that it is cost-effective to slowly recover the groundwater aquifer to a level close to the surface, while gradually lowering the groundwater value to the equilibrium at CNY 2.15 m−3. The model can be used to guide decision-makers to economic efficient long-term sustainable management of groundwater and surface water resources.


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