Human Activities, Climate Change and Water Resources in the Shiyang Basin
人类活动和气候变化对石羊河流域水资源的影响——基于主客观综合赋权分析法

Water resources are essential to the development of regional economies and to maintain the livelihoods of local peoples. Water resources affect, and sometime even decide, ecological and landscape patterns, especially in semi-arid and arid areas. The influence of human activity and climate change on water resources is of growing interest; however, how to measure the degree to which these two factors influence water resources remains a challenge. The quantitative and qualitative changes in water resources involve complicated hydrological processes, made more difficult by stochastic processes and various uncertainties. Here we use data from principle components and correlation analyses, population, GDP, number of livestock, temperature and precipitation. The contribution of climate change and human activity on water resources are calculated based on the theory of subjective and objective weighting. Our results show that for the Shiyang Basin, the comprehensive weight coefficients for human disturbance and climate fluctuations are 52.63% and 47.36%, respectively. The influence of climate change on water resources is more significant than the effect of human activity. Amongst changes to the climate, the impact of precipitation was more important than temperature. For human disturbances, the weighting of population is obvious and as high as 30.17%. The next important factor is the number of livestock; GDP had the smallest effect on water resources. The impact of climate change on water resources shows spatial variability by the contrast of the weight coefficient: in middle reaches of the basin climate changes have more influence on water resources than other areas. In upper streams the impact of climate changes on water resources is small as a result of snow accumulation and melting. In lower areas of the basin, rainfall effects and available water impose restrictions on evaporation and changes in climate have a small effect on water resources.