A novel framework for investigating the mechanisms of climate change and anthropogenic activities on the evolution of hydrological drought

Abstract

Climate change and anthropogenic activity are the primary drivers of water cycle changes. Hydrological droughts are caused by a shortage of surface and/or groundwater resources caused by climate change and/or anthropogenic activity. Existing hydrological models have primarily focused on simulating natural water cycle processes, while limited research has investigated the influence of anthropogenic activities on water cycle processes. This study proposes a novel framework that integrates a distributed hydrological model and an attribution analysis method to assess the impacts of climate change and anthropogenic activities on hydrological drought The distributed dualistic water cycle model was applied to the Fuhe River Basin (FRB), and it generated a Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient > 0.85 with a relative error of <5 %. Excluding the year with extreme drought conditions, our analysis revealed that climate change negatively impacted the average drought duration (−105.5 %) and intensity (−23.6 %) because of increasing precipitation. However, anthropogenic activities continued to contribute positively to the drought, accounting for 5.5 % and 123.6 % of the average drought duration and intensity, respectively, because of increased water consumption. When accounting for extreme drought years, our results suggested that climate change has contributed negatively to the average duration of drought (−113.2 %) but positively to its intensity (7.8 %). Further, we found that anthropogenic activities contributed positively to both the average drought duration and intensity (13.2 % and 92.2 %, respectively). While climate change can potentially mitigate hydrological drought in the FRB by boosting precipitation levels, its overall effect may exacerbate drought through the amplification of extreme climate events resulting from global climate change. Therefore, greater attention should be paid to the effects of extreme drought.