Abstract
Soil erosion resulted from human activities and associated land-use and
climate change threaten our societal and economic thriving. Major
policies and actions have been putting in place to protect soil from and
mitigate soil erosion, such as in Europe and Asia. The main objective of
our work is to synthesise the impacts of China’s policy response to
control soil erosion – the implementation of the Grain for Green
Program – on water resources in a large erosion-prone dryland area. A
combination of bottom-up (process-based knowledge) and top-down
(watershed input-output relationship) approaches is applied to review
the on-site and off-site hydrological impacts. The results highlight the
critical linkages to water and climate co-benefits in China’s soil
conservation programme. It is indicated that the lack of water-saving
strategy in measures of soil erosion control, such as the exclusion of
plantation forest management, is the primary cause of the intensified
water crisis in dryland China. A holistic understanding of the
interconnected characters of soil-water-climate is vital for developing
cross-cutting policy responses to address soil erosion. Our work
provides lessons-learned to the global long-term greening efforts in the
degraded arid environment. We strongly recommend careful hydrological
evaluation for drylands if tree-planting is used for soil conservation
with wishful climate and water co-benefits.