ABSTRACT
In responding to global ecosystem conservation and sustainable social development, numerous ecological restoration projects have been performed in ecologically vulnerable areas around the world, especially in semi-arid areas. Affected by local hydrothermal conditions, whether ecological restoration projects can achieve goals of balanced water-carbon enhancement as well as sustainable development in semi-arid areas is controversial. It is uncertain that to what extent the land use change caused by ecological restoration projects will affect the water-carbon imbalance. This research takes the Bashang Plateau Protection Zone (BPZ), a typical semi-arid area in Hebei Province of China, as a porotype to discover the spatial water-carbon changes and their contributing factors under ecological projects during 2000 to 2020 through root mean square deviation and random forest analysis. Results show: (1) In the past two decades, carbon sequestration in BPZ continued to improve while water conservation decreased significantly. The water-carbon imbalance regions in BPZ increased nearly 6.80 folds, from 338.60 km2 to 2642.38 km2. (2) Precipitation and temperature exerted the most significant impact on the formation of water-carbon imbalance regions, whereas the contribution of land use change could reach 40%, demonstrating that human activities were also strongly responsible for water-carbon imbalance. (3) Ecological restoration pattern of limiting afforestation and agricultural land expansion with priority restoration of grassland is beneficial to achieving water-carbon balance and sustainable goals of ecological restoration in semi-arid regions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.