China's ecological restoration projects deplete terrestrial water stores: Study

Researchers claim that China’s practice of converting large swaths of desert into grassland have substantially diminished terrestrially stored water

In a study published recently in Nature Sustainability, scientists at the University of California, Irvine report that the Asian nation’s environmental reclamation programs have substantially diminished terrestrially stored water.

According to Phys. Org, Isabella Velicogna, Co-author and UCI professor of Earth system science, said, “Large-scale ecological restoration is an increasingly popular human practice to combat land degradation and climate change. However, the impact of this on water resources until now had been understudied”

Researchers said the projects were depleting total land water resources at an “alarming rate”. They had constructed a continuous record spanning the pre-environmental reclamation period (1982 to 1998) and the post-restoration period (2003 to 2016).