System Evolution

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.

The temporal increase of the complexity index indicated that the virtual water outflows (VWFs) from the YRB were becoming increasingly critical to China; i.e. the ability of YRB to produce crops boosted the difficulty of its water being replaced by water exporting from other basins.

SDG interactions showed nonlinear changes as the SDG Index increased:SDGs were both more positively and more negatively connected at low and high sustainable development levels, but they were clustered into more isolated positive connection groups at middle levels.

Understanding how ecological restoration affects the regional water balance is important for scientific desertification management. Using remote sensing satellite images and meteorological data, we analyzed the impacts of ecological restoration on water resources in the Kubuqi Desert during 1986–2017.

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.

By eliminating positive effects from precipitation and including negative effects from breakpoints, TSS-RESTREND highlighted the potential overestimate of improvement by the linear regression method and the underestimate of degradation by the linear regression and RESTREND methods. These results showed that the land degradation detection with TSS-RESTREND method is useful for land conservation and restoration.

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).

Adaptive governance theory is influenced by “common pool resources management”, “resilience” and “governance”, and lays a foundation for the construction of transformative governance and collaborative governance.