The North China Plain is a crucial grain-producing region in China; however, long-term groundwater overexploitation has severely threatened regional water resource security and agricultural sustainability. In recent years, due to the operation of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, the implementation of groundwater extraction reduction policies, and increased precipitation, groundwater levels in the region have begun to recover. Nevertheless, a systematic quantitative study on the respective contributions of increased precipitation, reduced groundwater pumping, and external water diversion to groundwater recovery, as well as their variations across different cities, has been lacking.

A research group led by Professor Shen Yanjun at the Center for Agricultural Resources Research, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed a city-scale groundwater balance model. Taking seven cities in the southern Hebei Plain as the study area, they quantified the contributions to groundwater level recovery and conducted uncertainty analyses using Monte Carlo simulations. The study found that the two anthropogenic measures—groundwater pumping reduction and water diversion—together contributed 76% to regional groundwater recovery, with pumping reduction accounting for 30% and water diversion accounting for 46%, while increased precipitation contributed only 24%. This indicates that human management measures have played a dominant role in groundwater recovery. Uncertainty analysis demonstrated that the groundwater balance model exhibits good stability in attribution analysis. The findings highlight the necessity of formulating differentiated, zone- and category-based groundwater management strategies. The "moderately complex" water balance model developed in this study features a clear structure, moderate data requirements, and stable results, providing a methodological reference for attribution studies in other groundwater overexploitation areas.

The above research results were published in the international journal Journal of Cleaner Production under the title "Using a moderately complex model to quantify the contributions of increased precipitation, reduced pumping, and water diversion to groundwater recovery in the southern Hebei Plain." Associate Professor Liu Xia is the first author, and Professor Shen Yanjun is the corresponding author. The research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFD1900801), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42401035, 42471041, 42471050), the Innovation Group of Hebei Province (D2025503014), the International Partnership Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (090GJHZ2025023FN), and the Hebei Innovation Capability Improvement Program (253A7647D).

Paper link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652626017816

Figure 1. Boxplots of uncertainty in the contribution rates of increased precipitation, groundwater pumping reduction, and water diversion across cities in the southern Hebei Plain. The boxplot data are derived from 200 Monte Carlo simulation runs of the model, considering parameter uncertainty, input data uncertainty, and their combined uncertainty in the model uncertainty analysis.