Maximizing economic benefits with higher water productivity or lower water footprint is the core sustainable goal of agricultural water resources management. Here we look at spatial and temporal variations and developments in both production-based (PWF) and economic value-based (EWF) water footprints of crops, by taking a case study for China. A synergy evaluation index is proposed to further quantitatively evaluate the synergies and trade-offs between PWF and EWF.

The main objective of this work is to discuss the cumulative effects on flow regime with the construction of cascade reservoirs. A revised IHA (indicators of hydrologic alteration) method was developed by using a projection pursuit method based on the real-coded accelerated genetic algorithm in this study. Through this method, IHA parameters with a high contribution to hydrological-alteration evaluation could be selected out and given high weight to reduce the redundancy among the IHA metrics.

Previous studies on water saving through food trade focussed either on comparing water productivities among countries or on analysing food trade in relation to national water endowments. Here, we consider, for the first time, both differences in water productivities and water endowments to analyse national comparative advantages. Our study reveals that blue water scarcity can be reduced to sustainable levels by changing cropping patterns while maintaining current levels of global production.

The present work addresses the impact of climate change on the Water Highway project in Morocco. This project aims to transfer 860 × 106 m³ yr⁻¹ of water from the north to the south. As the project is very sensitive to the availability of water in the northern regions, we evaluate its feasibility under different future climate change scenarios: under a pessimistic climate scenario, the project is infeasible; however, under an optimistic scenario a rescaled version might be feasible.

We now lack sufficient empirical observations of consumptive use of water by humans and their economy, so it is worth considering what we can do with the withdrawal-based water use data we already possess. Fortunately, a wide range of applied water management and policy questions can be addressed using currently available withdrawal data. This discussion identifies important data collection problems and argues that the withdrawal data we already possess are adequate for some important purposes.

This study investigates the relationship between skill and value of ensemble seasonal streamflow forecasts. Using data from a modern forecasting system, we show that skilled forecasts are more likely to provide benefits for reservoirs operated to maintain a target water level rather than reservoirs operated to satisfy a target demand. We identify the primary causes for this behaviour and provide specific recommendations for assessing the value of forecasts for reservoirs with supply objectives.

In this study, we analyzed the water footprint (WF) of crop production and found winter wheat, summer maize and vegetables were the top water-consuming crops in the Hebei southern plain (HSP). The total WF, WFblue, WFgreen and WFgrey for 13 years (2000–2012) of crop production were 604.8, 288.5, 141.3 and 175.0 km³, respectively, with an annual downtrend from 2000 to 2012. Finally, we evaluated a reasonable farming structure by analyzing scenarios of the main crops' WF.

Benchmarks for the water footprint (WF) of crop production can serve as a reference and be helpful in setting WF reduction targets. The study explores which environmental factors should be distinguished when determining benchmarks for the consumptive (green and blue) WF of crops. Through a case study for winter wheat in China over 1961–2008, we find that when determining benchmark levels for the consumptive WF of a crop, it is most useful to distinguish between different climate zones.

Bivariate wavelet coherence has been used to explore scale- and location-specific relationships between two variables. In reality, a process occurring on land surface is usually affected by more than two factors. Therefore, this manuscript is to develop a multiple wavelet coherence method. Results showed that new method outperforms other multivariate methods. Matlab codes for a new method are provided. This method can be widely applied in geosciences where a variable is controlled by many factors.

This paper compares six methods for data-driven rainfall–runoff simulation in terms of predictive accuracy, error structure, interpretability, and uncertainty. We demonstrate that autocorrelation in model errors can result in biased estimates of important values and show how certain model structures can be more easily interpreted to yield insights on physical watershed function. Finally, we explore how model structure can impact uncertainty in climate change sensitivity estimates.

This paper quantitatively analyzed the evolution of human-water relationships in the Heihe River basin over the past 2000 years by reconstructing the catchment water balance. The results provided the basis for investigating the impacts of human societies on hydrological systems. The evolutionary processes of human-water relationships can be divided into four stages: predevelopment, take-off, acceleration, and rebalancing. And the transition of the human-water relationship had no fixed pattern.

As water resources are increasingly used for various purposes, there is a need for a unified framework to describe, quantify and classify water use in a region, be it a catchment, a river basin or a country. This paper presents a novel water accounting framework whereby the contribution of traditional water uses but also storage services are properly considered.