Resilience assessment of blue and green water resources for staple crop production in China

Abstract

Blue water (irrigation water) and green water (soil moisture), as natural bases in crop production, are vulnerable to natural and socioeconomic disturbances. However, quantitative resilience assessments of blue and green water for crop production are still lacking. Here we constructed a social-ecological based general water resilience assessment framework that distinguishes blue and green water for crop production in four dimensions, including resistance, absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity and transformative capacity. The framework was applied to quantify the spatiotemporal characteristics of water resource resilience for three staple crops (rice, wheat, and maize) at provincial level in mainland China over 2000–2017. Results indicate that water resilience related to crop production of China as a whole was at the lower-middle level over the study period. The green water resilience had higher initial performance, while the blue water resilience had a faster growth rate (>50%). The performance of adaptive and transformative capacity was 8.9∼153.7% better than resistance and absorptive capacity. There were significant heterogeneities in the water resilience score among crops and in time and space. Wheat had the highest resilience of green water, while its blue water resilience was the lowest among the three crops. The water resilience for crop production varied by up to 2.4-fold across provinces. Synergies and trade-offs among the four dimensions of water resilience were further evaluated. The current study provides an effective approach for assessing the state and progress of resilience of regional water resources for crop production.

Keywords

• Water footprint
• Social-ecological system
• Resistance
• Absorptive capacity
• Adaptive capacity
• Transformative capacity