Journal of Hydrology 617 (2023) 128999

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Journal of Hydrology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhydrol

Research papers

Impacts of precipitation variations on agricultural water scarcity under

historical and future climate change
Jiongjiong Liu a, b, Zhonghao Fu a, b, Wenfeng Liu a, b, *
a
Center for Agricultural Water Research in China, College of Water Resources and Civil Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China
b
National Field Scientific Observation and Research Station on Efficient Water Use of Oasis Agriculture in Wuwei of Gansu Province, Wuwei 733000, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Both blue water and green water contribute to agricultural water scarcity, which is subjected to impacts of
Blue water precipitation variations in the context of climate change. However, an explicit quantification of the possible
Green water effects of precipitation variations on agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) under historical and future climate
Agricultural water scarcity index
is absent. In this study, we applied an integrated AWSI, which incorporates blue water and green water, to es­
Precipitation variations
timate agricultural water scarcity in China and to determine the association of AWSI with precipitation variations
Climate change
Irrigation efficiency over the historical (1971–2010) and future (2031–2070) periods. Precipitation variations have substantial effects
on changes in AWSI. Especially during extremely dry years with precipitation anomaly lower than − 2 standard
deviation, changes of AWSI from the multi-year average could be as high as 31%. Future climate change would
further intensify AWSI and amplify the effects of precipitation variations, particularly in Inner Mongolia with
changes of AWSI over 200%. Southwestern China could also experience expanding agricultural water scarcity
under future climate scenarios. Improving irrigation efficiency has potential to alleviate water scarcity by up to
30%. This study provides valuable information for scientists and policy decision makers to cope with the impacts
of precipitation variations on AWSI.

1. Introduction
Water scarcity is the status under which water requirements of
agricultural, economic, social, and environmental sectors cannot be
satisfied by available water resources (Oki and Kanae, 2006). It has
become an increasing threat to humans and ecosystems sustainability,
and is expected to be more seriously under future climate change con­
ditions (Hoekstra, 2014, Richter et al., 2020, Schewe et al., 2014).
Agriculture is the world’s largest water user and is prominently
impacted by climate change and population growth (Gerten et al., 2020,
Ward and Pulido-Velazquez, 2008, Zhang et al., 2020). Continuously
increases in irrigation water withdrawal have led to growing water
scarcity in many places of the world (Falkenmark, 2013, Postel et al.,
1996, Qin et al., 2019). As a consequence, aggravation of water scarcity
in agriculture affects food production, and thus threatens food security
(Huang et al., 2017, Liu et al., 2022a, Pastor et al., 2019).
A proper assessment of water scarcity is the first step to address the
water scarcity issues. Most previous researches on water scarcity have
largely focused on blue water, i.e., available freshwater from
groundwater, streams, and lakes (Liu et al., 2017). Although green water
(the water store in soil aquifer and can be used as evapotranspiration by
crops) alone accounts for roughly 85 % of crop water demand across the
world (Hoekstra and Mekonnen, 2012, Liu et al., 2009), it has often been
ignored in water resources and scarcity evaluations (Liu et al., 2022a,
Xie et al., 2020). However, evaluations based on only blue water may
not sufficiently reflect the realistic water scarcity conditions in major
crop production regions (Nunez et al., 2013, Quinteiro et al., 2018).
That is because green water is the only water resources for rainfed
cultivations and an important part of water resources for irrigated lands.
As a result, concurrent variations in both blue and green water avail­
ability and consumption will affect water scarcity in agriculture (Liu
et al., 2017, Veettil and Mishra, 2016), which makes agriculture more
sensitive to climatic change in many places. There have been some ef­
forts to incorporate blue and green water scarcity in an integrated water
scarcity assessment. Liu et al. (2022a) developed a comprehensive
agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) that incorporates both green
and blue water availability and consumption and compared it with
conventional water scarcity index focusing only on blue water over the

* Corresponding author at: Center for Agricultural Water Research in China, College of Water Resources and Civil Engineering, China Agricultural University,
Beijing 100083, China.
E-mail addresses: wenfeng.liu@cau.edu.cn, wenfengliu@vip.sina.com (W. Liu).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2022.128999
Received 29 September 2022; Received in revised form 30 November 2022; Accepted 15 December 2022
Available online 19 December 2022
0022-1694/© 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
J. Liu et al.
period 1971–2010 on a global scale. After that, Liu et al. (2022b) applied
this index to assess the possible impacts of future climate change on
AWSI. However, Liu et al. (2022b) only explored the average changes of
agricultural water scarcity during the period 2026–2050. The major
limitation of these integrated studies is that the impacts of precipitation
variations on AWSI were overlooked for both historical and future
climate conditions.
Renewable water resources will be influenced by expected changes
in climate, especially changes in precipitation, therefore leading to
variations in water scarcity (Moursi et al., 2017). Recently, several
studies have investigated the effects of precipitation changes on water
scarcity on different spatiotemporal scales (Gampe et al., 2016, Gao
et al., 2021). For example, Coffel et al. (2019) found that future hot and
dry climate could worsen blue water scarcity in the Nile river basin
despite projected increases in future precipitation. Quinteiro et al.
(2019) assessed how climate in future could affect future green water
poverty under a reference period (1986–2005) and a future period
(2046–2065) climate in Portugal. Kummu et al. (2014) quantified the
effects of hydroclimatic change on global blue and green water resources
availability and requirements based on historical climate forcing data­
sets during the historical period 1977–2006. Besides, they also deter­
mined the frequency of water scarcity by quantifying the number of
years falling in the water scarcity. Although it is already known that
precipitation has direct impact on water scarcity, the level to which
precipitation variations would affect the integrated water scarcity
incorporating blue and green water is still unclear, especially during
extremely wet and dry years under both historical and future climate
conditions. This absent information impairs the formulation of robust
policy decision for coping with climate change effects on AWSI.
To address the above research gaps, this study applied an integrated
AWSI via combining green water and blue water availability and use as
well as environmental flow requirements (EFR) (Liu et al., 2022a), to
assess historical and future changes in AWSI and the linkages to changes
in precipitation. The mainland China was taken as the study area, given
that China is facing and will still experience severe water scarcity under
the current and future climate conditions (Cao et al., 2017, Liu et al.,
2019, Ren et al., 2021, Zhao et al., 2015, Zhu et al., 2019). The long-
term changes in AWSI in China was verified for the historical
(1971–2010) and future (2031–2070) periods at the grid (0.5 arc de­
gree) and province levels (locations of each province and separation of
northern and southern provinces are provided in Fig. S1). Agricultural
blue and green water availability and use were simulated by a large-
scale hydrological model, namely PCR-GLOBWB (Wada et al., 2014).
We considered two future Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP)
climate scenarios, i.e. low-emission scenario RCP2.6 and no-mitigation
scenario RCP6.0. This study explicitly and quantitatively determined
the possible impacts of precipitation variations on AWSI under the his­
torical and future periods, which provides useful information for policy
decision makers to formulate robust measures to tackle the water scar­
city issues.
2. Methods and data
2.1. Agricultural water scarcity index
The agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) was calculated as a
ratio of crop water demand (without water limitation) to total water
availability considering green water, blue water, and EFR (Liu et al.,
2022a). This index measures the degree to which total water availability
(including blue and green water) could meet crop water demand. When
AWSI > 1, it indicates that the total water availability is not enough to
meet the crop water demand, otherwise there is no agricultural water
scarcity. It could be estimated as:
∑n
i=1 ETci
AWSI = (1)
WAg + WAb
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Journal of Hydrology 617 (2023) 128999
WAb = (Q − WW os − EFR) • IE (2)
where ETci is the unstressed water demand for crop i (m3 mon− 1), which
was calculated by the product of potential evapotranspiration (PET) and
crop-specific coefficients (Allen et al., 1998); n is the number of crops
considered, which equals to 19 in this study; WAg is agricultural green
water availability (m3 mon− 1), which includes water evaporated from
soil moisture or rainwater from rainfed and irrigated cropland; WAb is
agricultural blue water availability (m3 mon− 1); IE is irrigation effi­
ciency (dimensionless); Q is total blue water resources, estimated as
streamflow (m3 mon− 1); WWos is water withdrawal for other sectors
except irrigation, including domestic, industrial, and livestock (m3
mon− 1); EFR is environmental flow requirements (m3 mon− 1), which is
estimated by the variable monthly flow (VMF) method (Pastor et al.,
2014). The VMF method is a valid hydrological method for estimating
environmental flow requirements on a large-scale, which uses simple
algorithm and takes into account intra-annual variability. It improves
environmental flow calculations due to increased time resolution from
an annual to monthly basis and has been widely used (Jagermeyr et al.,
2017, Pastor et al., 2019). The VMF method allocates 60 % of water
resources to EFR during low flow months (monthly streamflow: <0.4
times the long-term average); 45 % of water resources to EFR during
medium flow months (monthly flow: 0.4–0.8 times the long-term
average); and 30 % of water resources to EFR during high flow
months (monthly flow: > 0.8 times the long-term average). The esti­
mated EFR shows high value in the river channels, especially in the
lower reach of the Yangtze River basin (Fig. S2).
In this study, we first estimated monthly AWSI and then obtained
annual AWSI by averaging the monthly AWSI within each year. For
every province, average AWSI for grid cells in that province was treated
as the provincial AWSI.
2.2. Defining precipitation conditions
We applied the “standardized anomaly” method to define the extent
to which annual precipitation departs from its average condition, which
has been previously used to define dry and wet years (Jones and Hulme
1996, Li et al., 2019). Standardized anomaly (SA) can be regarded as the
change of climate condition (precipitation in this study) for a given year
t (prt) from its multi-year average condition (pr), normalized by the
standard deviation (σ):
prt − pr
SAt = (3)
σ
where SAt is the standardized anomaly of precipitation in year t. We
calculated the SA values of annual precipitation from 1971 to 2010 for
each province. Then annual precipitation was divided into different
categories based on the SA values at an interval of 0.5, i.e., (− ∞, − 2σ],
(− 2σ, − 1.5σ], (− 1.5σ, − 1.0σ], (− 1.0σ, − 0.5σ], (− 0.5σ, 0), (0, 0.5σ),
[0.5σ, 1.0σ), [1.0σ, 1.5σ), [1.5σ, 2σ), [2σ, 2.5σ), [2.5σ, +∞), according
to Li et al., (2019). Dry (wet) years were defined as years with SA lower
than − 1σ (larger than +1σ). We considered extremely dry years with SA
lower than − 2σ. Similarly, moderately dry (moderately wet) years were
defined as years with SA between − 1σ and 0 (between 0 and 1σ). Pre­
cipitation standardized anomaly which approximates to 0 is considered
to be more akin to normal (or average) condition. After this step, we
could identify the province-specific dry and wet conditions based on the
local climate condition of each province.
2.3. Impacts of different precipitation conditions on agricultural water
scarcity index
The impacts of precipitation variations on AWSI with a specific
province was quantified via comparing the average AWSI falling into a
specific SA category to the average AWSI over the long-term period (e.g.
J. Liu et al. Journal of Hydrology 617 (2023) 128999

1971–2010 for the historical period and 2031–2070 for the future
period):
ΔAWSIp,i = (AWSI p,i − AWSI p,m )/AWSI p,m • 100 (4)

where ΔAWSIp,i is the relative change of AWSI over years with SA falling
in the i SA category to multi-year average AWSI in province p (%);
AWSIp,i is the average AWSI over years with SA in the i category;
AWSIp,m is the average AWSI over the multi-year. This relative change
reflects the changes of AWSI from its long-term trend because of pre­
cipitation variation. After obtaining the relative change in AWSI and the
corresponding precipitation anomalies of each year in each province,
the national average effects of precipitation variations on ASWI can be
derived by integrating all province-year combinations with an area-
weight aggregation method (Li et al., 2019). In addition, we further
quantified the changes of AWSI over the dry, moderately dry, moder­
ately wet, and wet years from the multi-year average for each province.

2.4. Changes in future agricultural water scarcity index and effects of

irrigation efficiency

Future AWSI was estimated by using eq. (1) but with water avail­
ability and water demand data simulated by future climate data over the
period 2031–2070. Similar to historical period, we estimated the SA
values according to future precipitation and divided the SA into different
categories. We computed multi-year average AWSI over all future years
(2031–2070) (AWSIfut,m) and future dry years (AWSIfut,d) for all prov­
inces. The relative changes of AWSIfut,m and AWSIfut,d to multi-year
average AWSI over all historical years (1971–2010) (AWSIhist,m) and
historical dry years (AWSIhist,d) were quantified to indicate the impacts
of future climate change on AWSI:
ECCm,m = (AWSI fut,m − AWSI hist,m )/AWSI hist,m • 100 (5)
Fig. 1. Average agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) over the period
ECCd,m = (AWSI fut,d − AWSI hist,m )/AWSI hist,m • 100 (6) 1971–2010 in China at the grid cell (a) and provincial (b) levels.

ECCd,d = (AWSI fut,d − AWSI hist,d )/AWSI hist,d • 100 (7)
where ECCm,m is the effect of climate change on AWSI over all future
years to all historical years (%); ECCd,m the effect of climate change over
the future dry years to all historical years (%); ECCd,d the effect of
climate change over the future dry years to historical dry years (%);
AWSIhist,m and AWSIfut,m are the average AWSI for all historical and
future years; AWSIhist,d and AWSIfut,d are the average AWSI for the his­
torical and future dry years.
To isolate the effects of pure future climate change on AWSI, we used
the historical IE around the year 2010, which is the earliest available
province-specific IE data, to estimate historical and future AWSI. Be­
sides, we also determined the possible mitigation on AWSI by increasing
IE in 2010 to two proposed IE scenarios in 2030. We kept the future
irrigation areas consistent with the historical period, given large un­
certainties in projecting future irrigation areas.
2.5. Data source
This study was conducted for the mainland China at grid cell (a
spatial resolution of 0.5 arc degree) and province levels for the historical
(1971–2010) and future (2031–2070) periods. Historical and future
monthly PET, water withdrawals, evaporated water from soil water or
rainwater were simulated by the PCR-GLOBWB model. PCR-GLOBWB is
a grid-based large-scale hydrology and water resources model (Wada
et al., 2014). PCR-GLOBWB was developed to estimate global daily
surface water balance at a spatial resolution of 0.5 arc degree and to
represent different water withdrawals for meeting diverse water de­
mands. It can estimate water withdrawals for irrigation, industry, do­
mestic and livestock, which are influenced by irrigation area, crop water
demand, population, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and
livestock density. More details of the model could be found in Wada
et al. (2014). This model has been widely used globally (Sutanudjaja
et al., 2018, Wanders and Wada, 2015). These data were provided by the
Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP) phase 2a
(historical period) and 2b (future period). Over the historical period,
three different climate datasets were used to force the PCR-GLOBWB
model, namely GSWP3 (Dirmeyer et al., 2006), WATCH-WFDEI (Wee­
don et al., 2014, Weedon et al., 2011), and Princeton (Sheffield et al.,
2006) following the ISIMIP 2a protocol. For the future simulations, four
General Circulation Models (GCMs), i.e. GFDL-ESM2M, HadGEM2-ES,
IPSL-CM5A-LR, and MIROC5, were used to drive the PCR-GLOBWB
model following the ISIMIP2b protocol. Two RCPs, i.e. RCP2.6 and
RCP6.0, were considered for future projections. ISIMIP2b was particu­
larly designed for a 1.5 degree warming scenario, therefore simulations
under scenario RCP8.5 were not provided. We used the average of
different variables simulated by different climate forcing data for both
historical and future periods to reduce uncertainties associated with
climate inputs.
In this study, we adopted the simulations of monthly streamflow (the
variable “dis” in the ISIMIP protocol) to estimate blue water availability.
The variable “arainfusegreen” for rainfed cropland and “airrusegreen”
for irrigated cropland from the ISIMIP archive were used to compute
agricultural green water availability (Liu et al., 2022b). The ETc data
were estimated by the method of Liu et al (2022a) for 19 crops, including
barley, cassava, citrus, cotton, grapes, groundnut, maize, millet, potato,
pulses, rapeseed, rice, rye, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sugar cane,
sunflower, and wheat. The MIRCA2000 dataset (Portmann et al., 2010)
was used to locate the irrigated and rainfed croplands, as well as the
growing period for each crop. Other information for estimating ETc, e.g.
crop growth stage and crop-specific coefficient for scaling PET to ETc
were obtained from Allen et al. (1998). The historical simulations by the

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J. Liu et al. Journal of Hydrology 617 (2023) 128999

Fig. 2. Relationship between agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) and precipitation over the period 1971–2010 in a northern province (Shandong, a)
and a southern province (Guangdong, b). For AWSI, dash line represents the mean value; for precipitation, the dotted line, dash line, and dash dot line represent
mean − 1σ (standard deviation), mean, and mean +1σ of multi-year precipitation, respectively. Red, light red, light blue, and blue colors indicate dry, moderately
dry, moderately wet, and wet years. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

PCR-GLOBWB model considered a continuous change in human activ­ 3. Results

ities, while the socioeconomic conditions (e.g., population, gross do­
mestic production, and land use) were fixed at the year 2005 for the
future period, which was designed by the ISIMIP2b protocol. To keep the
historical and future AWSI comparable, i.e. both under the socioeco­
nomic condition of 2005, we de-trended the historical AWSI by
removing the multi-year linear trend and scaled it to the year 2005.
The IE data in the year 2010 obtained from the Bulletin of Water
Resources in China at the provincial level (CPGPRC, 2012) was used for
estimation of historical AWSI. We used the IE data in 2010 to estimate
future AWSI for the purposes of isolating the pure effects of climate
change on AWSI. In addition, projected IE in 2030 was used to reveal the
impacts of improving IE on mitigating AWSI (Table S1). The Chinese
government reported that national average IE in 2025 and 2030 would
reach to 0.58 and 0.60, respectively, and provided province-specific IE
in 2025 (MWRC and NDRCC, 2022). We multiplied provincial IE in 2025
by the ratio of average IE in 2030 to average IE in 2025 (0.60/0.58) to
obtain the province-specific IE in 2030. Besides, we also used a high
national average IE (0.70) in 2030 to estimate future AWSI for the period
2031–2070.
3.1. Water scarcity assessment during the historical period
The average AWSI of per grid cell over the period 1971–2010 varies
largely throughout the Mainland China (Fig. 1a). Regions with high
AWSI values (AWSI > 1) are mainly distributed in the northwestern,
northern, and central eastern parts of China, particularly in the North
China Plain. On the other hand, AWSI is generally low in the southern
China. At the provincial level, the estimated average AWSI also changes
substantially between the southern and northern provinces over the
historical period (Fig. 1b). Severe agricultural water scarcity is found in
Shandong, Tianjin, Hebei, Jiangsu, Henan, and Liaoning provinces.
Average AWSI in the southern China is generally lower than 0.5, with
AWSI of being lower than 0.2 in the southwestern part of China.
3.2. Impacts of precipitation variations on agricultural water scarcity
index
Fig. S3a shows that coefficient of variation (CV, the ratio of standard
deviation to mean) of precipitation is relatively large in northern China

4
J. Liu et al.
Fig. 3. Relative changes of agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) in different precipitation conditions compared to average AWSI in each province
during the 1971–2010 period. (a) dry years with precipitation anomalies lower than − 1σ; (b) moderately dry years with precipitation anomalies between − 1σ and
0; (c) moderately wet years with precipitation anomalies between 0 and 1σ; and (d) wet years with precipitation anomalies higher than 1σ.
provinces, especially in Xinjiang, Beijing, and Tianjin provinces.
Meanwhile, there are strong negative correlations between annual pre­
cipitation and AWSI over the period 1971–2010 (Fig. S3b). Unlike the
CV, the correlations are more significant among the southern provinces.
To explore the possible impacts of precipitation variations on AWSI,
we plotted the AWSI-precipitation interaction in a water scarce northern
province (Fig. 2a, Shandong province) and a water abundant southern
province (Fig. 2b, Guangdong province). The variations of annual pre­
cipitation in Shandong and Guangdong are relatively large (with σ being
131 mm and 252 mm, respectively). For all dry years with precipitation
anomaly lower than –1σ over the 1971–2010 period, the AWSI values
are highest and above the multi-year average for both Shandong and
Guangdong provinces. With respect to wet years with precipitation
anomaly higher than +1σ, the AWSI values are the lowest.
For each province, AWSI during the historical dry years experienced
considerable positive changes from the multi-year average, particularly
in Xinjiang, Shanxi, Beijing, and Zhejiang provinces with the changes
over than 30 % (Fig. 3). On the other hand, during the wet years, AWSI
presents substantially negative changes from the multi-year average.
These positive and negative departures show large spatial variability
over China. Generally, the northern provinces and eastern provinces
show larger changes compared to the southern and western provinces,
which is consistent with spatial distribution of the CV of precipitation
over the historical period (Fig. S3a). We further found that the anoma­
lies of AWSI during dry or wet years present statistically significant (p <
0.05) relationship with CV of precipitation (Fig. S4). Anomalies of AWSI
tend to be large when CV of precipitation is high.
We aggregated percentage changes of AWSI from province-year
samples on the national scale to show water scarcity response to pre­
cipitation anomalies during the historical period in China. Fig. 4 exhibits
5
Journal of Hydrology 617 (2023) 128999
the ratios of province-year combinations in each precipitation anomaly
ranging from dry to wet conditions and the changes of AWSI from
provinces’ multi-year AWSI average. It is clear that (moderately) dry
precipitation anomalies have significantly (p < 0.05) increased AWSI.
Especially for the province-year combinations with precipitation
anomaly lower than − 2.0σ, average AWSI in this category is ~31 %
higher than the multi-year mean, although the sample ratio is only about
2 %. On the other hand, AWSI in (moderately) wet years is lower than
the multi-year average, with ~29 % decrease for the precipitation
anomaly higher than 2.5σ. Generally, AWSI during dry years could be
~21 % higher than the multi-year average (Fig. S5).
3.3. Changes in agricultural water scarcity index under future climate
change
AWSI under future climate would have substantial changes
compared to the historical AWSI (Figs. S6-S7). Future precipitation
variations will also induce strong influences on AWSI (Figs. S8-S9).
Therefore, future climate change could have big effects on AWSI in
terms of the relative changes of AWSI during all future years and future
dry years to those during all historical years and historical dry years
(Fig. 5). The ECCm,m shows positive values in 19 provinces under the
RCP2.6 scenario and 20 provinces under the RCP6.0 scenario (Fig. 5a
and b), indicating increases in future averaged AWSI. The Inner
Mongolia province has the largest increases in AWSI over 200 %. On the
other hand, future AWSI would have a decreasing trend over the prov­
inces with high historical AWSI, e.g. Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, and Liaon­
ing provinces. Interestingly, we found that future climate change would
have more pronounced effects on changes of agricultural water scarcity
compared to the effect of historical precipitation variations (Figs. 3 and
J. Liu et al.
Fig. 4. Changes of agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) due to pre­
cipitation variations. (a) ratio (%) of province-year samples in each precipi­
tation anomaly to all province-year samples along the precipitation anomalies;
(b) percentage change (%) of AWSI relative to multi-year average among
different precipitation anomalies. In subplot b, each bar represents AWSI per­
centage change weighted by provincial area from province-year samples; error
bars represent 95% confidence interval estimated from 1,000 bootstrap esti­
mations. Precipitation anomaly lower than − 1σ is defined as dry years, while
higher than 1σ as wet years. The number of total province-year samples
is 1,240.
5).
The AWSI of future dry years has more dramatic increases relative to
the AWSI of all historical years (Fig. 5c and d), with 24 and 26 provinces
showing increasing AWSI under RCP2.6 and RCP6.0 scenarios. In
addition, we found that the ECCd,m are even higher than 100 % in 8 and
7 provinces under RCP2.6 and RCP6.0 scenarios, respectively. It means
that AWSI over future dry years would more than double the current
average AWSI in those provinces. By comparing AWSI of dry years be­
tween future and historical periods, there are more provinces presenting
positive ECCd,d values than provinces with negative ECCd,d values
(Fig. 5e and f). It implies that future dry conditions would have more
pronounced impacts on AWSI than historical dry conditions over the
provinces with positive ECCd,d values, especially in the southwest part of
China. However, the ECCd,d values are in quantity lower than ECCd,m.
3.4. Impacts of irrigation efficiency on agricultural water scarcity
Improving IE (irrigation efficiency) has potential to decrease the
negative impacts of future dry precipitation condition on AWSI (Fig. 6).
For example, estimated AWSI during future dry years in Jiangsu prov­
ince using IE in 2010 has the highest value among the 31 provinces in
China. This high AWSI could decrease by 11 % and 20 % if China’s
national average IE could increase to 0.6 and 0.7. Generally, improving
IE has stronger effects on declining AWSI in the provinces with lower
AWSI. For example, AWSI in future dry years could decrease by 10 %
and 18 % with national IE changing to 0.6 and 0.7 for the provinces with
AWSI (by using IE in 2010) lower than 1; while these decreases are only
7 % and 13 % for the province with AWSI (by using IE in 2010) higher
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Journal of Hydrology 617 (2023) 128999
than 1 under the RCP2.6 scenario. Tibet has the highest decrease in
AWSI (about 20–30 %) by improving IE. These effects also hold for
average AWSI over all future years (Fig. S10).
4. Discussion
4.1. Impacts of precipitation variations on agricultural water scarcity
Precipitation variations could have direct impacts on the availability
of streamflow in the river systems (blue water) and soil moisture (green
water) for crop production, resulting in changes in agricultural water
scarcity. Although it was well recognized that precipitation variations
could have impacts on water scarcity (Coffel et al., 2019), there is no a
quantitative study to determine the changes of water scarcity from
multi-year average along different precipitation anomalies for both
historical and future climate. In this study, we applied the integrated
water scarcity index combining blue water and green water to estimate
AWSI in China and for this first time, to our knowledge, explicitly
revealed the percentage changes of AWSI relative to multi-year average
under different precipitation anomalies. Our study demonstrates that
precipitation variations under both current and future climate condi­
tions have substantial impacts on the AWSI. During the historical dry
years (precipitation anomaly lower than –1σ), AWSI is at least 20 %
higher than the multi-year average (Fig. 4 and Fig. S5). Especially under
historical extreme dry condition (precipitation anomaly lower than
–2σ), AWSI could be +30 % higher than the average, indicating strong
negative impacts of precipitation variations on AWSI. Future climate
change would further amplify these impacts, with possible changes over
than 200 % in Inner Mongolia and Qinghai provinces (Fig. 5).
AWSI exhibits distinct spatial patterns in responses to precipitation
variations, which is mainly regulated by the CV of precipitation and the
correlation between precipitation and AWSI (Figs. S3 and S4). There­
fore, particular attentions should be paid to the provinces with strong
negative correlation and high precipitation variations during the dry
years, for example the provinces of Xinjiang, Shanxi, and Beijing, where
AWSI during dry years were 30 % higher than multi-year averages over
the historical period (Fig. 3). This study provides useful knowledge to
tackling future water scarcity by explicitly identifying these regions.
4.2. Measurements to tackle the impacts of precipitation variations
Future climate change would worsen agricultural water scarcity in
many provinces of China, for example Inner Mongolia and several
southwest provinces. Moreover, variations of future precipitation to­
wards dry condition further exacerbate the already water scarcity con­
dition there (Fig. 5). In such cases, different technologies and political
measurements should be taken into consideration to alleviate the water
scarcity issues. Our study shows that improving IE is a useful approach
(Fig. 6). However, the effects of improving IE on decreasing AWSI is
constrained in the regions with already high AWSI. This is mainly
because IE is used to scale the blue water availability according to the
AWSI estimation method. With little blue water availability, improving
IE can only have minor effects on AWSI alleviation. Also, attentions
should be paid to the unintended increases in overall water uses when
attempts to increase IE given the paradox of IE (Grafton et al., 2018).
Redistribution of water resources between different seasons and
different years would partially offset the effects of hydrological varia­
tions but requiring smart water management technologies, e.g. reliable
precipitation forecast and rainwater harvest. In addition to the strategies
to increasing or stabilizing water resources, measurements to reducing
crop water demand, e.g. sustainable intensification (Liu et al., 2018),
reducing food losses and wastes (Xue et al., 2021), optimization of crop
cultivation areas (Davis et al., 2017), would also have high potentials to
alleviate agricultural water scarcity.
J. Liu et al.
Fig. 5. Effects of future climate change on agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) under scenarios RCP2.6 (left panel) and RCP6.0 (right panel) over the
period 2031–2070. Effect of climate change on AWSI over all future and historical years (ECCm,m, a, b); effect of climate change over the future dry years to all
historical years (ECCd,m, c, d); effect of climate change over the future and historical dry years (ECCd,d, e, f).
4.3. Future research dimension of integrated water scarcity and the
climate change impacts
We applied the integrated AWSI, which incorporates blue water and
green water in the estimation, to detect the impacts of precipitation
variations under current and future climate conditions on water scarcity.
This integrated index is also with limitation. For example, it cannot
detect water scarcity associated with water uses for other sectors than
agriculture. Also, water quality and other resources, e.g. recycled water,
and desalinated water and groundwater, should also be included in a
more comprehensive water scarcity index, considering water quality
and other water resources could also have effects on water scarcity (van
Vliet et al., 2021) and future climate would significantly affect water
quality and water resources (Liu et al., 2020). However, proposing such
a comprehensive water scarcity index is out of the scope of this study,
but deserves attention in the future research.
In addition to providing a more general and comprehensive water
scarcity indicator, several other directions regarding the analyses of
water scarcity index should be highlighted. The AWSI accounting covers
a few key processes of crop growth, human activities, and hydrological
cycles. It therefore is subjected to uncertainties from different resources,
e.g. from crop water use estimates (Liu et al., 2016) to water resource
calculation (Greve et al., 2018). It could be found that the PCR-GLBOWB
simulated hydrological variables by using different climate forcing
datasets could induce different estimations of AWSI, while the estimated
7
Journal of Hydrology 617 (2023) 128999
AWSI using GSWP3 tends to be closer to the average value (Fig. S11).
Therefore, we used the average of hydrological simulations driven by
multi-climate datasets of historical and future periods to reduce possible
uncertainties. More aspects of uncertainties should be included in future
research, e.g. from the choice of potential evapotranspiration estimation
method, global hydrological models, and land use scenarios. Besides, we
demonstrate significant impacts of precipitation variations on AWSI and
the impacts are associated with CV of precipitation and correlation be­
tween precipitation and AWSI in China. However, our analyses were
conducted at the provincial level, mainly due to coarse resolution of
simulated water resources data from ISIMIP. However, the large size of
province ignores the spatial variability of green water, blue water, as
well as crop water demand within a province, which could dim the
significance of the results. Future studies could apply the similar
approach to finer spatial scales, e.g. local river basin level, which will
facilitate the detection of precipitation variations and correlation be­
tween precipitation and water scarcity, hence the impacts of precipita­
tion variations on agricultural water scarcity.
5. Conclusions
In this research, we evaluated an integrated agricultural water
scarcity index, i.e. AWSI, which incorporates green water and blue
water, and linked the changes of AWSI to precipitation variations in
China for the historical (1971–2010) and future (2031–2070) periods.
J. Liu et al. Journal of Hydrology 617 (2023) 128999

Fig. 6. Impacts of different irrigation efficiencies (IE) on agricultural water scarcity index (AWSI) for dry years over the period 2031–2070 under scenarios
RCP2.6 (a) and RCP6.0 (b). For each subplot, the upper panel shows the future average AWSI over future dry years with IE data in 2010; the lower panel shows the
relative changes of estimated AWSI over future dry years by using national average IE = 0.6 and national average IE = 0.7 to the estimated AWSI over future dry
years by using IE in 2010. Provinces are sorting by a descending order of AWSI under the RCP2.6 scenario.

We explicitly quantified the changes of AWSI from the long-term aver­
ages. Annual precipitation shows high temporal variations, while AWSI
and precipitation presents strong negative correlations. AWSI during
extremely dry years (precipitation anomaly lower than –2σ) and dry
years (precipitation anomaly lower than –1σ) can be 31 % and 21 %
higher than the multi-year average, respectively. Future climate change
would further intensify agricultural water scarcity in many provinces,
especially during future dry years with 24 and 26 provinces showing
increasing AWSI under RCP2.6 and RCP6.0. Qinghai and Inner Mongolia
provinces would have particularly high increases in AWSI under future
dry condition. Improving irrigation efficiency has potential to alleviate
agricultural water scarcity, but with lower effects in the already water
scarce regions. The high positive changes of agricultural water scarcity
from multi-year average under both historical and future periods call for
special attentions to deal with the impacts of precipitation variations on
agricultural water scarcity. Future studies should propose more
comprehensive water scarcity index and investigate the precipitation
variation impacts at finer spatial scales.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Jiongjiong Liu: Formal analysis, Investigation, Visualization,
Writing – original draft. Zhonghao Fu: Software, Validation, Writing –
review & editing. Wenfeng Liu: Conceptualization, Funding acquisi­
tion, Methodology, Supervision, 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.

8
J. Liu et al.
Data availability
Data will be made available on request.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison
Project (ISIMIP) for providing the global hydrological simulation data.
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (52109071 and 52239002) and the Chinese Universities Scientific
Fund (2022RC035).
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.
org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2022.128999.
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