Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 30 (2020) 100700

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Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies

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Assessing future socioeconomic drought events under a changing

T
climate over the Pearl River basin in South China
Suning Liua,b, Haiyun Shia,b,*, Jun Niuc, Ji Chend, Xingxing Kuanga,b
a
State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Integrated Surface Water-Groundwater Pollution Control, School of Environmental Science and
Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
b
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Soil and Groundwater Pollution Control, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern
University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
c
College of Water Resources & Civil Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China
d
Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

A R T IC LE I N F O ABS TRA CT

Keywords: Study region: Pearl River basin (PRB) in South China.

SEDI Study focus: This study aims to assess future socioeconomic drought events under a changing
Climate change climate over the study region. Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model is used to simulate the
GCM streamflow in the PRB during the period of 2020–2099, and 48 projected precipitation datasets
VIC model
from General Circulation Models (GCMs) are selected to drive the VIC model at 0.5° × 0.5°
Pearl River basin
spatial resolution and daily temporal resolution. Then, the minimum in-stream water require-
ment (MIWR) of the PRB is determined, and trend analysis of the simulated streamflow is con-
ducted. Socioeconomic drought index (SEDI) is used to detect the occurrence of socioeconomic
drought event, and further, the impact of the reservoirs in the PRB on drought analysis is eval-
uated.
New hydrological insights for the region: Based on any dataset, nearly one hundred socioeconomic
drought events at different severity levels can be identified in the PRB; however, most of them,
especially those at severe and extreme levels, can be mitigated through reservoir operation, i.e.,
reserving at least 40 % of the total manageable storage capacity (TMSC) in the reservoirs.
Overall, this study can improve the recognition of future socioeconomic drought events, which is
of great value for our society to effectively assess the impacts of climate change and water
projects on sustainable water resources utilization in such river basins.

1. Introduction

Drought is a natural hazard that usually occurs across a relatively large spatial-temporal scale. According to American
Meteorological Society (2013), four categories of drought can be defined, namely, meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, and
socioeconomic drought, respectively. A great number of previous research works have studied the former three categories of drought,
and a lot of drought indices have been developed or proposed in the past decades (e.g., Palmer, 1965; Heim, 2002; Shukla and Wood,
2008; Vicente-Serrano et al., 2010; Moorhead et al., 2015; Lin et al., 2017; Sun et al., 2019). Some representative drought indices
include Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration

⁎
Corresponding author at: State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Integrated Surface Water-Groundwater Pollution Control, School of
Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
E-mail address: shihy@sustech.edu.cn (H. Shi).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2020.100700
Received 11 March 2020; Received in revised form 27 April 2020; Accepted 27 May 2020
Available online 05 June 2020
2214-5818/ © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).
S. Liu, et al. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 30 (2020) 100700

Index (SPEI), Standardized Runoff Index (SRI), and so on. However, for the fourth category, i.e., socioeconomic drought, several
indices have been proposed since 2015 (e.g., Mehran et al., 2015; Huang et al., 2016; Shi et al., 2018; Tu et al., 2018; Guo et al.,
2019a, 2019b). Normally, the occurrence of socioeconomic drought is in association with water supply and water demand against the
minimum in-stream water requirement (MIWR). In the earlier years, several studies (e.g., Fraser et al., 2008; Bosongo et al., 2014;
Maia et al., 2015; Eklund and Seaquist, 2015) have begun to discuss the socioeconomic characteristics/impacts of drought. For
example, Fraser et al. (2008) provided a preliminary step to quantify socioeconomic characteristics of drought-sensitive regions in
China. Bosongo et al. (2014) analyzed the socioeconomic impacts of droughts in the middle Zambezi River basin. Eklund and Seaquist
(2015) emphasized the importance of understanding drought from both physical and socioeconomic perspectives.
Similar to the other three categories of drought, several relevant drought indices have been developed to describe socioeconomic
drought. For example, Mehran et al. (2015) firstly developed the Multivariate Standardized Reliability and Resilience Index (MSRRI)
for evaluating socioeconomic drought; however, this index cannot describe drought duration. Then, Guo et al. (2019a) further
proposed an improved MSRRI (IMSRRI) in order to consider reservoir operation processes and the relationship between water supply
and demand. In addition, Shi et al. (2018) proposed another index named SocioEconomic Drought Index (SEDI) through synthetically
considering water deficit and duration of a socioeconomic drought event. Tu et al. (2018) developed a framework of multivariate
design of socioeconomic drought, and the main properties include duration, severity, and peak. All the above indices and methods
can provide new ways of assessing socioeconomic drought events for a given region; however, none of these indices and methods
focused on the whole Pearl River basin (PRB) in South China, namely the study area of this study.
It is worth noting that, global water demand has greatly increased in the past decades and will probably keep increasing at least in
the near future because of continuous population growth and rapid economic development (e.g., Chen et al., 2016; Shi et al., 2019),
which may lead to the occurrence of more socioeconomic drought events (e.g., Smirnov et al., 2016; Trinh et al., 2017). Furthermore,
climate change is recognized as a crucial factor that may have non-negligible impacts on socioeconomic drought. A changing climate
may significantly influence water supply (mainly from streamflow) because even a slight climate change may cause a significant
change in water cycle (e.g., Vicuna et al., 2013; Shi and Wang, 2015; Lee et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2019; Zhou et al., 2020). At the
global scale, many regions around the world will probably face the challenges of more frequent and severe hydrological extremes
such as drought (e.g., Hirabayashi et al., 2008; Shi et al., 2015; Schwalm et al., 2017; Ahmed et al., 2018; Vicente-Serrano et al.,
2019). Specifically, for China, the difference of economic loss caused by drought disasters may reach 100 billion Chinese Yuan under
two global warming scenarios of 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C (Su et al., 2018). At the regional scale, for the PRB, a number of previous studies on
climate change have been conducted (e.g., Niu and Chen, 2010; Fischer et al., 2013; Niu, 2013; Niu et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2018,
2019b; Li et al., 2020; Dai et al., 2020). For example, Niu et al. (2014) investigated the historical extreme hydrological events over
the PRB during 1952–2000 through exploring the teleconnections between two climatic patterns and hydrological processes.
Moreover, in future, the projected climate extremes over the PRB during 2011–2050 indicated that the eastern and western parts
would be warmer and drier (Fischer et al., 2013). Wang et al. (2018) reported that, the severity and variability of drought were
expected to increase in this century in most regions of the PRB, mainly due to an increase in evapotranspiration. Wang et al. (2019b)
applied a climate model to assess the effects of urbanization and global climate change in the Pearl River Delta, and found that global
climate change would increase the extreme heat stress level in this region. However, none of these studies on the whole PRB focused
on the assessment of future socioeconomic drought events.
From the above, it is known that, none of the previous studies on climate change over the whole PRB focused on socioeconomic
drought, while none of the previous studies on socioeconomic drought focused on the whole PRB. Therefore, in order to fill such gaps,
this study aims to assess the future socioeconomic drought events under climate change over the PRB. The SEDI proposed by Shi et al.
(2018) will be adopted for analysis because it has been validated over the East River basin (ERB), which is a sub-basin of the PRB. In
the following, Section 2 briefly introduces the methodologies used in this study (i.e., the SEDI and VIC model), Section 3 describes the
study area (i.e., the PRB) and research data, and Section 4 presents the detailed results and discussion, including 1) the MIWR value of
the PRB, 2) trend analysis of the future streamflow, 3) identification of future socioeconomic drought events, 4) impact of reservoirs,
and 5) limitations. Finally, the major conclusions of this study are summarized in Section 5. Overall, the outcomes of this study can
provide valuable information for decision-makers, e.g., a better recognition of socioeconomic drought under a changing climate, a
reference for sustainable water resources management, and a guideline of designing reservoir operation schemes.

2. Methodology

Fig. 1 shows the technology roadmap of this study. The first step is collection of various data, such as the Global Circulation Model
(GCM) output, the socioeconomic data (e.g., population data and gross domestic product (GDP) data), the historical streamflow data,
the reservoir operation data, and so on. Second, the MIWR value of a given river basin, which is regarded as the critical variable in
identifying drought occurrence and duration, is determined by analyzing the historical streamflow data and the projected future
water demand (see subsection 2.1 for details). Third, the future streamflow is simulated with Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC)
model (see subsection 2.2 for details) and the GCM output, and future socioeconomic drought events can then be identified by
comparing the simulated streamflow data and the MIWR value (Shi et al., 2018). Fourth, different percentages of the used reservoir
storage capacity are discussed to investigate the impact of reservoir operation on reducing the number of identified future socio-
economic drought events.

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Fig. 1. The technology roadmap of this study.

2.1. SocioEconomic Drought Index (SEDI)

The SEDI proposed by Shi et al. (2018), which has been proved to be effective in the ERB, is adopted in this study to identify
future socioeconomic drought events at the monthly scale. The steps of the SEDI calculation are as follows. First, the MIWR value of a
given river basin is calculated and used as the threshold value to identify drought occurrence and duration. Second, the monthly
streamflow data, either the observed or simulated data, are used to identify drought month through calculating the monthly dif-
ference between the monthly streamflow data and the corresponding MIWR value. A month with the monthly difference smaller than
0 (i.e., water deficit) will be regarded as a drought month. Third, the cumulative water deficit is derived from the monthly water
deficit, and a drought event will continue until the cumulative water deficit turns into a non-negative value. Then, the drought
duration (i.e., the number of continuous drought months) and water shortage (i.e., the largest cumulative water deficit during the
drought period) of a drought event can be identified. Finally, for an identified drought event, the SEDI value can be obtained through
integrating the impacts of water shortage level (WSL) and drought duration level (DDL). The definition of the SEDI value is as follows:
SEDI = max {DDL , WSL} (1)
where the DDL and WSL both have four values, i.e., 1, 2, 3, and 4 (Table 1), and the SEDI value is defined as the larger one of the DDL
and WSL values. Therefore, the SEDI also has four values, i.e., 1, 2, 3, and 4, corresponding to the four levels of socioeconomic
drought; that is, SEDI = 1 for slight level, SEDI = 2 for moderate level, SEDI = 3 for severe level, and SEDI = 4 for extreme level.
More details of this index can be found in Shi et al. (2018), and only the following two aspects related to this index are further
highlighted in this study.
First, it is important to calculate the MIWR value for a given river basin, which is a vital component of the SEDI. The MIWR is also
regarded as the threshold value to sustain different functions, e.g., water quality, ecology, navigation, and water intake (Wu and
Chen, 2013), which can be expressed as follows.
MIWR = max {Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4} + Qs (2)
where Q1 is the required value for maintaining water quality, Q2 is the required value for ecology, Q3 is the required value for
navigation, Qs is the required value for preventing seawater intrusion, and Q4 is the required value for water intake. Among these, the
values of Q1, Q2 , Q3 , and Q4 are assumed to be invariable over time, and their values can be obtained from past assessments of annual
water resources. By contrast, the Qs value is highly related to population growth and economic development, and thus, is assumed to
be changeable over time (Shi et al., 2018). Using per capita GDP and population as two indicators, Chen et al. (2015) have developed

Table 1
The cutoff values of different WSL (water shortage level) and DDL (drought duration level) values (Shi et al., 2018).
WSL DDL

Level Cutoff value Level Cutoff value

1 RSP∈[0, 40 %) 1 1−3 months

2 RSP∈[40 %, 60 %) 2 4−6 months
3 RSP∈[60 %, 80 %) 3 7−12 months
4 RSP∈[80 %, +∞) 4 More than 12 months

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a long-term water demand projection model based on multivariate linear regression method, which has been proved to be applicable
for regions such as Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, the ERB, and the PRB. Therefore, in this study, the MIWR value of the study area,
which denotes the future water demand of the study area, can be calculated with this model under different scenarios. Moreover, in
order to maintain the healthy life of a river, the Qs value is suggested to be no more than 30 % of river discharge (e.g., Zuo, 2011; Shi
et al., 2018).
Second, the definitions of the SEDI on four levels (i.e., slight, moderate, severe and extreme) are the same as those in Shi et al.
(2018), as well as the cutoff values of different WSL and DDL values (Table 1). For the WSL determination, reservoir storage per-
centage (RSP), which is a variable related to typical reservoir storage (usually equal to the effective storage capacity of a reservoir) in
a given river basin (Denver Water, 2002), is used as an indicator to classify different levels. It is worth noting that, the RSP can be
calculated as the absolute value of the largest cumulative water deficit divided by the typical reservoir storage. In this study, the total
manageable storage capacity (TMSC) of the reservoirs in a given river basin is used as the typical reservoir storage, and therefore, the
dam data from the Global Reservoir and Dam (GRanD) database (Lehner et al., 2011) is also collected for calculating the TMSC value
(see subsection 3.2 for details). For the DDL determination, a socioeconomic drought event at the quarterly (1–3 months), semi-
annual (4–6 months), annual (7–12 months), or longer (more than one year) scale is assigned the values of 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively.

2.2. Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) model

VIC model (Liang et al., 1994), a macroscale land surface hydrological model that can solve full water and energy balances, is
used to simulate the future streamflow for identification of socioeconomic drought events. VIC model is originally developed by Liang
et al. (1994) and further improved by Hamman et al. (2018). VIC model uses the variable infiltration curve (Zhao et al., 1980), which
allows for the representation of sub-grid variability in soil storage capacity and infiltration capacity, and the parameterization of
baseflow as a nonlinear recession curve from the bottom soil layer (Todini, 1996). VIC model can share a number of basic features
with other land surface models that are commonly coupled to the GCMs. RVIC model, a source-to-sink model that can solve the Saint-
Venant equations, is used as a post-processor with VIC model to separately simulate the routing of streamflow (e.g., Lohmann et al.,
1996, 1998).
VIC model has been successfully applied to a lot of the large river basins around the world (e.g., Nijssen et al., 2001; Christensen
et al., 2004; Andreadis et al., 2005; Niu and Chen, 2010; Bao et al., 2012; Niu et al., 2014; Wang et al., 2019a). Specifically, for the
PRB, two previous studies (i.e., Niu and Chen, 2010; Niu et al., 2014) indicated that the streamflow simulations from VIC model were
basically comparable to the observations from ten hydrological stations over the PRB. The Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficients for
most of the ten hydrological stations were higher than 0.80, and the relative biases were generally within the range of ± 0.25, which
can satisfy the performance ratings suggested by Moriasi et al. (2007). Moreover, Niu et al. (2017) examined the multi-scale
streamflow variability responses to precipitation over 16 headwater catchments over the PRB using VIC model, and Wang et al.
(2019a) proposed an operation-based reservoir scheme integrated with VIC model to simulate the storage and outflow variations of
reservoirs at the daily time step. Therefore, this study directly uses the parameters obtained from the previous studies (e.g., Niu and
Chen, 2010; Niu et al., 2014) to run VIC model and RVIC model over the PRB, and then, the future streamflow under different climate
change scenarios can be obtained.

3. Study area and data

3.1. Study area

The Pearl River is the second largest river in China in terms of river discharge, flowing through six provinces in South China
(Fig. 2). The PRB consists of four parts, i.e., the West River, the North River, the East River, and the Pearl River Delta, with the total
drainage area of 453,690 km2 (Table 2). The annual average precipitation of the PRB is 1,480 mm, about 80 % of which occurs from
April to September. Moreover, the precipitation over the PRB are distributed with highly spatial-temporal heterogeneities, which may
easily cause regional hydrological extremes such as floods and droughts (e.g., Niu and Chen, 2010; Niu et al., 2014).
The long-term annual average discharges of the whole PRB and the PRB excluding the Pearl River Delta are 10,518 m3/s and
9,525 m3/s, respectively (e.g., Niu and Chen, 2010), and the details of the four parts are listed in Table 2. More than 18,000 reservoirs
have been constructed over the PRB; however, there are only 41 large reservoirs with a reservoir capacity larger than 0.1 km3, e.g.,
the Longtan Reservoir (i.e., 27.3 km3) in the West River basin (WRB), the Feilaixia Reservoir (i.e., 1.9 km3) in the North River basin
(NRB), and the Xinfengjiang Reservoir (i.e., 13.9 km3) in the ERB (Fig. 2). The two pie diagrams in Fig. 2 indicate the 41 large
reservoirs classified by the total storage capacity and main use in percent, respectively. It is worth noting that the two main uses of
the large reservoirs in the PRB are hydroelectricity (46 %) and irrigation (39 %).

3.2. Data

Our previous study (i.e., Shi et al., 2018) has indicated that, comparing against the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change) AR4 (the Fourth Assessment Report) GCMs, the IPCC AR5 (the Fifth Assessment Report) GCMs will provide a more optimistic
estimation on future drought situation. As a result, in order to assess the possible worst-case situation of future drought, this study
only selects the projected precipitation datasets derived from the outputs of 16 AR4 GCMs during 1951–2099 (see Table 3). In this
study, the 16 AR4 GCMs under three climate change scenarios (i.e., Special Report on Emissions Scenario, SRES A1B/A2/B1) are

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S. Liu, et al. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 30 (2020) 100700

Fig. 2. The Pearl River basin (PRB) and the large reservoirs in this river basin. Note: the two pie diagrams indicate the 41 large reservoirs classified
by the total storage capacity and main use in percent.

Table 2
Geographic features of the PRB.
Basin Area (km2) Length of the main reach (km) Annual average discharge (m3/s) Average slope of the main reach (%)

West River 353,120 (77.83 %) 2,075 (above Sixianjiao) 7,093 0.0580

North River 46,710 (10.30 %) 468 (above Sixianjiao) 1617 0.0260
East River 27,040 (5.96 %) 520 (above Shilong) 815 0.0388
Pearl River Delta 26,820 (5.91 %) 139 993 −0.0048
PRB 453,690 2,214 10,518 0.0453

Table 3
Summary of the 48 selected datasets.
Number Name Number Name

1 bccr_bcm2_0.1 2 ncar_ccsm3_0.1
3 cccma_cgcm3_1.1 4 cnrm_cm3.1
5 csiro_mk3_0.1 6 mpi_echam5.1
7 miub_echo_g.1 8 gfdl_cm2_0.1
9 gfdl_cm2_1.1 10 giss_model_e_r.1/2
11 inmcm3_0.1 12 ipsl_cm4.1
13 miroc3_2_medres.1 14 mri_cgcm2_3_2a.1
15 ncar_pcm1.1/2 16 ukmo_hadcm3.1

selected (IPCC, 2007), and therefore, there will be 48 projected precipitation datasets derived from the 16 AR4 GCM outputs with
0.5°×0.5° spatial resolution (Wood et al., 2004; Meehl et al., 2007). Moreover, the soil and vegetation parameters extracted from the
study of Nijssen et al. (2001) are used as the inputs of VIC model to provide the simulated streamflow at the daily scale, and the
monthly simulated streamflow can be derived from the daily values. The vegetation data are from the 1 km vegetation database on
the basis of AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) data (Hansen et al., 2000). The soil texture and soil bulk density

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Table 4
The required values for water quality, ecology, navigation, and seawater intrusion prevention in the PRB.
Basin WRB NRB ERB Total

Q1 (m3/s) 1,800 416 317 2,533

Q2 (m3/s) 703 250 230 1,183
Q3 (m3/s) / 190 210 /
Q4 (m3/s) 2,200 150 2,350

are from the 5 min FAO-UNESCO (Food and Agriculture-United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) digital
soil map of the world and the WISE (World Inventory of Soil Emission Potentials) Pedon database; the remaining soil parameters are
obtained based on the study of Cosby et al. (1984).
Furthermore, in order to explore the impact of reservoirs on drought analysis, the GRanD database (Lehner et al., 2011) is
collected to calculate the TMSC value of the reservoirs in the PRB. In this database, for each dam (and related reservoir), the basic
information includes: name, year of completion, longitude, latitude, height, storage capacity, installed capacity, catchment area,
main use, and so on. However, since the manageable storage capacity of a reservoir is not available in this database, this study
roughly assumes that the manageable storage capacity is equal to the total storage capacity of a reservoir. As mentioned above, this
study only considers the 41 large reservoir with a reservoir capacity larger than 0.1 km3 in the PRB by the year 2010 (see Fig. 2), and
thus, the TMSC value is about 79 km3, which is regarded as the stored water in these reservoirs when the flood season ends.

4. Results and discussion

4.1. The MIWR of the PRB

The MIWR of the PRB can be computed with Eq. (2). As the rivers in the Pearl River Delta are all small ones, this study only
considers the other three parts of the PRB, i.e., the WRB, the NRB, and the ERB. Table 4 lists the estimated values of Q1, Q2 , Q3 , and Q4
obtained from previous studies, e.g., the required value for water quality (PRBWRPB et al., 2000; Lee et al., 2007), ecology
(PRBWRPB et al., 2000; Zhang et al., 2010), navigation (Song and Huang, 2006; Lee et al., 2007), and seawater intrusion prevention
(Wu et al., 2001; Liu et al., 2013). It is worth noting that the Q3 value of the WRB is not available; however, this missing Q3 value
would not be large enough to affect the MIWR value of the PRB. This is because the required water for navigation will not be larger
than that for maintaining water quality for the same river (i.e., the Q1 value is 1,800 m3/s) so that the total Q3 value will not be larger
than 2,200 (= 1,800 + 190 + 210) m3/s. Therefore, the maximum value among Q1, Q2 , Q3 , and Q4 is 2,533 m3/s in the PRB, which is
assumed to be a constant value in future.
Furthermore, the Qs value will change over time because the regional water demand will increase due to population growth and
economic development in future. This will also lead to the change of the MIWR value. Base on the estimated socioeconomic data (e.g.,
population data and the GDP data) of the six provinces (i.e., Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, Hunan and Jiangxi) in South
China within the boundary of the PRB during 2020–2099, Chen et al. (2015) firstly projected the annual water demand in each of the
six parts under three projection scenarios, which represent the high, medium, and low development levels, respectively; then, the
annual water demand in the whole PRB can be obtained by summing up the projected values of the annual water demand in these six
parts. For example, under the medium scenario, the annual water demand in the PRB will keep increasing before the year 2075,
followed by a declining trend from 2075 to 2099; similarly, under the high scenario, the annual water demand in the PRB will keep
increasing before the year 2085 and then decrease from 2085 to 2099. Then, combining with the maximum value of Q1, Q2 , Q3 , and Q4
(i.e., 2,533 m3/s), the MIWR value of the PRB under the three projection scenarios for each year during 2020–2099 is computed
(Fig. 3). To assess future socioeconomic drought events on the average level, the MIWR values under the medium scenario are
selected, and the maximum Qs value of 2,873 m3/s under this scenario is found in the year 2075. Comparing with the annual average

Fig. 3. The minimum in-stream water requirement (MIWR) values of the PRB from 2020 to 2099 under three projection scenarios which represent
the high, medium, and low development levels.

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Fig. 4. The trends of the simulated streamflow in the PRB during 2020-2099 for each of the 48 datasets. Note: the shadows indicate that the slopes of
the trends are statistically significant at the significance level of p < 0.1.

river discharge of the PRB excluding the Pearl River Delta (i.e., 9,525 m3/s) (Table 2), the maximum Qs value under this scenario
accounts for 30.2 % (= 2,873/9,525) of the total river discharge, which is quite close to the limited value (i.e., 30 %). As a result,
other Qs values under this scenario will meet the requirement for the water intake restriction since they are all smaller than the
maximum Qs value.

4.2. Tendency of future streamflow

Based on the future streamflow simulated with VIC model and each of the 48 projected precipitation datasets, tendency of the
future streamflow in the PRB is analyzed at the annual scale for each year during 2020–2099 using the Mann-Kendall trend test
method (e.g., Mann, 1945; Kendall, 1975; Thiel, 1950; Sen, 1968; von Storch and Navarra, 1995; Shi et al., 2016, 2017; Zhou et al.,
2020). Fig. 4 shows the slopes of the detected trends for all the 48 datasets, and the shadows indicate the statistically significant
slopes at the significance level of p < 0.1. It is observed that the slopes of the detected trends vary greatly among different datasets,
i.e., −1.68 to 3.89 mm/year under A1B scenario, −1.34 to 5.33 mm/year under A2 scenario, and −1.60 to 4.98 mm/year under B1
scenario, respectively. In addition, most of the 48 selected datasets (i.e., 37/48 = 77 %) show the increasing trends, and there are 12,
13, and 12 datasets under A1B, A2, and B1 scenarios, respectively. Among them, 20 datasets (i.e., 20/37 = 54.1 %) show statistically
significant increasing trends (p < 0.1) (see Fig. 4). By contrast, the remaining 11 datasets (i.e., there are 4 (A1B), 3 (A2), and 4 (B1),
respectively) show the opposite trends, among which, the declining trend of only one dataset (csiro_mk3_0.1) is statistically sig-
nificant (p < 0.1) (see Fig. 4). Specifically, the largest increasing tendency (i.e., 5.33 mm/year) is found in one dataset (ukmo_-
hadcm3.1) under A2 scenario, while one dataset (csiro_mk3_0.1) under A1B scenario shows the largest declining tendency (i.e.,
−1.68 mm/year) (see Fig. 4).
It is worth noting that the results of trend analysis of the future streamflow in the PRB are generally similar to those in the ERB
(Shi et al., 2018). That is, for the future streamflow simulated with the 48 selected datasets at the annual scale, the number of datasets
showing the increasing trends is larger than that showing the declining trends. It would be good if the future streamflow were evenly
distributed in space and time. Unfortunately, as significant spatial-temporal variability exists in streamflow distribution, there is often
a mismatch between water supply and demand when coupled with population growth and economic development (e.g., Anctil and
Coulibaly, 2004; Tootle and Piechota, 2006; Rubio-Alvarez and McPhee, 2010; Chen et al., 2016). Therefore, the obtained results of
trend analysis of the future streamflow in the PRB do not mean that there must be fewer socioeconomic drought events from 2020 to
2099, especially at the monthly scale, and thus, the next subsection will conduct further analyses on assessing future socioeconomic
drought events at the monthly scale.

4.3. Assessing future socioeconomic drought events

Based on the MIWR values of the PRB under the medium projection scenario (Fig. 3), the simulated monthly streamflow in the
PRB, and the SEDI proposed by Shi et al. (2018), this study identifies the socioeconomic drought events from 2020 to 2099, and the
relevant analyses are as follows.
First, Fig. 5a–c present the numbers of the identified future socioeconomic drought events at different severity levels under the
three selected scenarios, and the results are rather different among various datasets. For the total numbers of all the identified events,
the values fluctuate within the range of 73–105 for all the 48 datasets, which are 75–101 (A1B), 73–105 (A2), and 79–102 (B1),
respectively. Specifically, the maximum (i.e., 105, in the dataset of giss_model_e_r.1/2) and minimum values (i.e., 73, in the dataset of
cnrm_cm3.1) are both found under A2 scenario. However, for the mean of the total numbers under each of the selected scenarios, the
values are 89 (A1B), 87 (A2), and 89 (B1), respectively, which are nearly on the same magnitude. Comparing with the mean values in

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S. Liu, et al. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 30 (2020) 100700

Fig. 5. The numbers of socioeconomic drought events at different severity levels for (a) A1B, (b) A2, and (c) B1 scenarios. (d) The longest drought
durations for all the 48 datasets.

the ERB, i.e., 100 (A1B), 99 (A2), and 102 (B1), respectively (Shi et al., 2018), the situation of future socioeconomic drought events in
the PRB seems better, at least in terms of the total number. Nevertheless, with reference to the number of the identified extreme
events for all the 48 datasets, the overall percentage is 22 % in the PRB, which is twice of that in the ERB (i.e., 11 % for the same
datasets). Moreover, severe socioeconomic drought events account for the similar overall percentage (38 % in the PRB) to that in the
ERB (i.e., 35 % for the same datasets). As a result, the situation of future socioeconomic drought events in the PRB seems worse in
terms of extreme socioeconomic drought events. As mentioned above, under a changing climate, the occurrence of hydrological
extremes such as drought at the global scale will probably be more frequent, and the severity will be higher (e.g., Schwalm et al.,
2017; Ahmed et al., 2018; Vicente-Serrano et al., 2019). This seems to be applicable to the situation of the whole PRB.
Second, Fig. 5d presents the longest drought durations of the identified socioeconomic drought event for all the 48 datasets. The
mean value of all the 48 identified longest drought durations is 28 months in the PRB, which is lower than that in the ERB (i.e., 33
months) (Shi et al., 2018), and the mean values under the three selected scenarios are 26 (A1B), 34 (A2), and 25 (B1), respectively.
Specifically, in the ERB, the longest drought duration of the identified socioeconomic drought events is 93 months under A1B
scenario (i.e., in the dataset of csiro_mk3_0.1); however, under the same scenario, the longest drought duration is only 34 months in
the PRB. It indicates that some identified socioeconomic drought events in the ERB may be mitigated through inter-basin water
planning and management. For example, the West-to-East Water Diversion Project being constructed in Guangdong Province can
transfer water from the WRB to the ERB to release the pressure of water shortage in the ERB. In addition, the top three values of all
the 48 identified longest drought durations are all found in the datasets under A2 scenario, i.e., 61 months (miroc3_2_medres.1), 59
months (gfdl_cm2_1.1), and 58 months (cnrm_cm3.1), respectively. This is mainly due to that the A2 scenario represents high
emission scenario with more evaporation and less surface runoff (e.g., Wang et al., 2009).
Third, for each of the 48 datasets, the largest RSP value is calculated to present the most serious water shortage, and the relevant
results are listed in Table 5. For all the 48 datasets, the largest RSP values fluctuate within the range of 0.92–2.93; for the three
selected scenarios, the largest RSP values fluctuate within the ranges of 0.92–2.71 (A1B), 0.93–2.93 (A2), and 0.96–1.79 (B1),
respectively, and the corresponding mean values are 1.49, 1.62, and 1.32, respectively. Moreover, it is worth noting that most (i.e.,
40/48 = 83 %) of the largest RSP values are larger than 1.0 (Table 5), which indicates that there will still be water deficits in such
cases even if the TMSC of the reservoirs in the PRB is run out. As a result, more reservoirs are needed to increase the TMSC of the
reservoirs in the PRB, and that is why some large reservoirs (e.g., the Datengxia Project with the total storage capacity of 3.7 km3)
have been either planned or under construction in recent years (e.g., Zhang et al., 2020).

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S. Liu, et al. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 30 (2020) 100700

Table 5
The largest RSP (reservoir storage percentage) values for all the 48 datasets.
NO. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

A1B 1.28 1.18 0.93 2.68 1.39 1.46 1.04 1.05 1.95 0.96 2.71 1.62 1.50 1.82 1.35 0.92
A2 1.32 1.39 1.06 2.93 1.60 1.45 0.93 1.45 2.57 0.97 1.83 1.83 2.25 2.02 1.40 0.99
B1 1.70 1.30 1.09 1.45 1.52 1.55 0.99 1.45 1.07 1.05 1.59 1.20 1.79 1.21 1.23 0.96

4.4. Impact of reservoirs

Previous studies (e.g., Chen et al., 2016; Shi et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2017, 2019) revealed that reservoir is of great importance to
sustainable water resources utilization, and thus, the impact of the reservoirs in the PRB on mitigating socioeconomic drought events
is further investigated in this subsection. Fig. 6 shows the monthly available water volume of the reservoirs in the PRB during
2020–2099 for two representative datasets, which are ukmo_hadcm3.1 under A1B scenario (i.e., the best case, the largest RSP =
0.92) and cnrm_cm3.1 under A2 scenario (i.e., the worst case, the largest RSP = 2.93), respectively. The red dashed lines in Fig. 6a
and b denote the situation that the TMSC of the reservoirs in the PRB (i.e., 79 km3) is run out. For the selected dataset under A1B
scenario, the TMSC of the reservoirs in the PRB seems to be enough to meet future water demand because the blue line in Fig. 6a is
above the red dashed line; by contrast, for the selected dataset under A2 scenario, part of the blue line is below the red dashed line,
which indicates that the TMSC of the reservoirs in the PRB (i.e., 79 km3) is still not enough to alleviate some socioeconomic drought
events with serious water shortage (see Fig. 6b).
Furthermore, it is roughly assumed in this study that the manageable storage capacity of a reservoir is equal to its total storage
capacity, which will certainly overestimate the role of the reservoir in water supply. Actually, the available water volume of the
reservoirs in the PRB when the flood season ends is usually less than the TMSC value (i.e., 79 km3), and this can affect the results of
future drought analysis to a certain extent. To quantify this impact, the numbers of the identified future socioeconomic drought
events considering different used percentages of the TMSC of the reservoirs in the PRB is calculated and further discussed for all the
48 datasets, and the interval of the used percentage of the TMSC is 10 %. The relevant results are shown in Fig. 7 (i.e., the red circles
denote the datasets under A1B scenario, the blue squares denote the datasets under A2 scenario, and the green triangles denote the
datasets under B1 scenario, respectively). To facilitate analysis, the mean value of the numbers of the identified future socioeconomic
drought events is calculated for each of the used percentages of the TMSC (i.e., 0, 10 %, 20 %, 30 %, …, 100 %), and it is clear that,
the mean values present an overall declining trend along with the increase of the used percentage of the TMSC (see the gray dashed
line in Fig. 7), which can be divided into three phases with the average slopes of −0.61, −1.07, and −0.60, respectively (see the
three black lines in Fig. 7). The R2 values are all over 0.97, indicating quite high goodness of fit. The two cutoff values of the three

Fig. 6. The available water volume of the reservoirs in the PRB during 2020-2099 for (a) the best case and (b) the worst case. The red dashed lines:
the total manageable storage capacity (TMSC) of the reservoirs in the PRB (i.e., 79 km3) is run out.

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S. Liu, et al. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 30 (2020) 100700

Fig. 7. The numbers of the identified future socioeconomic drought events considering different used percentage of the total manageable storage
capacity (TMSC) of the reservoirs in the PRB based on the 48 datasets. The black lines: the linear trends.

phases are found within the range of 30 %–40 % and 80 %–90 %, respectively. Known from Fig. 7, only fewer than 20 socioeconomic
drought events are still remaining on average when more than 80 % of the TMSC is used. However, it may not be practical to reserve
so much water because the TMSC of the reservoirs in the PRB has already been overestimated. If only focusing on extreme and severe
events, the suggested value of the used percentages of the TMSC will reduce to 40 %. In this circumstance, there will be 2, 3, and 1
extreme socioeconomic drought events and 8, 9, and 9 severe socioeconomic drought events during 2020–2099 under A1B/A2/B1
scenarios, respectively. Since it is an acceptable result, this study suggests that at least 40 % of the TMSC of the reservoirs in the PRB
should be reserved when the flood season ends.

4.5. Limitations

Taking the PRB as a larger study area than the ERB (Shi et al., 2018), this study further validates the effectiveness of the SEDI in
humid regions with reservoir operation. However, this study still has the following limitations.
First, when calculating the MIWR, which is one of the key variables to calculate the SEDI, the values of Q1, Q2 , Q3 , and Q4 are
assumed to be invariable over time. This may be oversimplified because the Q1 (for water quality) and Q2 (for ecology) values can
have seasonal variations (e.g., Olias et al., 2004; Huang et al., 2014). Therefore, further studies can be conducted to investigate the
potential impacts on the process of socioeconomic drought event identification.
Second, since the RSP is another key variable to calculate the SEDI, whether the SEDI is applicable in arid/semi-arid regions or
regions without reservoir operation may need more validations in future studies. One option is to replace the RSP with a generalized
value of regional water supply, which can be simply considered as the total available water resources in a given region.
Third, the successful applications of the SEDI at the monthly scale do not mean that this index will also be effective at smaller time
scales (e.g., ten-day scale and daily scale). Generally, the smaller the time scale, the more significant the alternation between dryness
and wetness. For example, a heavy rainfall event may possibly interrupt a socioeconomic drought event, and thus, how to evaluate
the impact on drought persistence is an important issue in further studies.
Fourth, although a number of studies on socioeconomic drought have been conducted, its physical mechanism is still unclear,
which is worth thorough investigation. One option is to analyze the relationships of socioeconomic drought with atmospheric
characteristics (e.g., air temperature, air pressure, and wind field), main climatic patterns (e.g., El Niño-Southern Oscillation, ENSO),
and sea surface temperature.

5. Conclusions

This study assesses the future socioeconomic drought events under climate change over the PRB in South China during
2020–2099, using the index (i.e., the SEDI) proposed by Shi et al. (2018). The major findings of this study are summarized as follows:
First, this study provides the MIWR value of the PRB for each year from 2020 to 2099, which can be used as a criterion of
sustainable water resources utilization in this river basin. Second, the trend analysis of the future streamflow simulated with VIC
model and 48 datasets is conducted in the PRB, and the results indicate that the number of datasets showing the increasing trends is
larger than that showing the declining trends in this river basin. Third, this study identifies future socioeconomic drought events in
the PRB during 2020–2099, and the results indicate that the situation in the PRB is better than that in the ERB. Fourth, this study
explores the impact of the reservoirs on drought analysis in the PRB, and suggests reserving at least 40 % of the TMSC in the
reservoirs in order to mitigate most of the identified future socioeconomic drought events at severe and extreme levels.
Overall, the SEDI and the obtained results of the identified socioeconomic drought events can improve the recognition of drought
from a socioeconomic perspective, which would be of great value for our society to effectively assess the impacts of climate change
and water projects on sustainable water resources utilization.

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S. Liu, et al. Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies 30 (2020) 100700

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Suning Liu: Formal analysis, Data curation, Writing - original draft. Haiyun Shi: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing -
review & editing. Jun Niu: Resources, Validation, Methodology. Ji Chen: Supervision, Writing - review & editing. Xingxing Kuang:
Funding acquisition, Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

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.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China funded projects (51909117, 91747204),
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Soil and Groundwater Pollution Control (2017B030301012), and State Environmental
Protection Key Laboratory of Integrated Surface Water-Groundwater Pollution Control. We are also grateful to the two anonymous
reviewers who offered the insightful comments leading to improvement of this paper.

Appendix A. Supplementary data

Supplementary material related to this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2020.
100700.

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