Hidden costs of a thriving Yellow River: Severe groundwater depletion

Abstract

Groundwater storage (GWS) is essential for supporting agricultural irrigation and revegetation in the water-scarce Yellow River Basin (YRB). Early studies have mainly focused on the impacts of revegetation on GWS, and rarely consider the influences of agricultural irrigation and other human activities, rendering the driving mechanisms of GWS unclear. Here we used NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite data, the PCR-GLOBWB2 hydrologic model, and an Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) machine learning approach to reveal changes, driving mechanisms, and future trends in GWS in the YRB. Results show that GWS in the YRB decreased by ∼101 Gt in 2003−2020, roughly 24 times the Yellow River’s flow into the sea in 2000. Notably, GWS depletion (−7.7 mm/yr) dominates the observed terrestrial water storage (TWS) losses (−6.0 mm/yr) and accounts for >100% of the net TWS decline. Storage losses are largely explained by increases in evapotranspiration (+6.0 mm/yr) driven by revegetation and agricultural irrigation. This is evident in higher evapotranspiration rates (+3 mm/yr) observed in heavily revegetated areas, with irrigation showing an estimated contribution of −6.6 mm/yr on GWS by the PCR-GLOBWB2 model. GWS losses are projected to persist until 2060 by the LSTM model, with a total storage loss of ∼237 Gt. With GWS declining and natural recharge growth lagging behind the rise in groundwater demand, the YRB confronts a future of groundwater deficits. The study suggests that although groundwater extraction for agricultural and ecological benefits might appear helpful to the region in the short term, this trajectory is physically unsustainable and detrimental to the water-scarce Yellow River.

Keywords

Groundwater / GRACE / Yellow River / Agricultural irrigation / Water storage / Revegetation

Data availability

Some raw data required to reproduce the above findings are publicly available, and the download links has been provided in the main text. Groundwater well data are available from the corresponding author upon request.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Mengzhu Liu: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Visualization, Validation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Yilin Shen: Writing - review & editing. Ying Guo: Writing - review & editing, Formal analysis. Lili Yu: Data curation. Yongqing Qi: Writing - review & editing. Bojie Fu: Writing - review & editing. Yanjun Shen: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Methodology, Funding acquisition.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Bojie Fu is Editor-in-Chief for this journal and was not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42041007), the Project for Innovative Research Group of the Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (Grant No. D2025503014), and the Innovation Group Project Agricultural Hydrology and Groundwater Sustainability by Hebei Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. D2021503001). We sincerely appreciate Prof. Bai Zhaohai, Prof. Ma Lin and Dr. Ahmed Yehia Mady for their helpful suggestions and revisions of the manuscript.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100407.

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