Yellow River

In the Yellow River Basin, the underlying causes of regime shifts were increasing water supply and demand before the governance transformation and re-allocation and regulation after the change. The IWGI offers a comprehensive and straightforward approach to linking water governance regimes to sustainability, providing valuable insights into hydrosocial transitions.

We employ a Differenced Synthetic Control method to assess the impacts of the institutional shifts. Our analysis suggests that the 87-WAS unexpectedly increased water use by 5.75%, while the 98-UBR successfully reduced water use as anticipated.

An agent-based model was developed around the Yellow River’s most far-reaching water quota institution during the past half century, considering how factors such as human behaviour and environmental change have combined with the institutional shifts to lead to changes in the Yellow River’s water use.

During these 30 years, YRB surface waters were characterized by spatial and seasonal heterogeneities. The open-surface water coverage in the upper and middle reaches of the YRB was 8.74‰ and 4.24‰, respectively, less than the average coverage in the whole YRB of 9.45‰. Surface water area was significant larger in flood seasons than in dry seasons, while during 1990–2020, the surface water area increased by 27.5% in the flood season and by 58.9% in the dry season, reaching 7239.2 km2 (flood season) and 6654.8 km2 (dry season) in 2020.

Collective memory plays a controlling role in adaptation to potential flood risks, by learning from past disasters. Based on survey data, we suggest that using the Universal Decay Model (UDM) proposed by previous researchers provides better fitting results for the decay of flooding memory.

The Yellow River, once the world’s most sediment-rich river, has experienced dramatic regime shifts. We reanalyzed previous datasets to clarify the first historical sediment transport regime shift in the Yellow River. Our results suggest a regime shift occurred only under increased forcing from anthropogenic stresses (after 1900 AD).

The Yellow River, once the world’s most sediment-rich river, has experienced dramatic regime shifts. We reanalyzed previous datasets to clarify the first historical sediment transport regime shift in the Yellow River. Our results suggest a regime shift occurred only under increased forcing from anthropogenic stresses (after 1900 AD).