Agricultural Drought Resisting and Hydrological-Ecological Changes Taking Hebei Province in North China as an Example

Drought is usually supposed to be a rainfall deficiency problem. Most studies and practices to mitigate drought disaster are focusing on water development and irrigation, while neglecting that the agriculture system is a compounded human-natural system. Drought situation and tendency is also driven by human coping strategies. This paper takes Hebei Province in north China as an example, studing the spirally interact process of drought resisting and hydrological ecological feedback. The result shows that large scale water projects construction facilitated irrigation. With improved irrigation, farmers enhanced multiple crop index and land-use intensity greatly and increased the sowing area of water consuming crop, winter wheat. At the same time, both crop yield and gross output are raising steadily. Water demand and depletion in agricultural system increase year by year. This gradually leads to highly dependent on over exploitation of water resources, especially overdraw of groundwater. The process deteriorated