Political risks arising from the impacts of large-scale afforestation on water resources of the Tibetan Plateau

• China leads the world in afforestation, with 1/3 of the world's planted forests.
• These forests decrease the availability of water for other ecosystem components.
• The Tibetan Plateau provides water to nearly half of Asia's population.
• We demonstrated potentially severe impacts on river discharge from the plateau.

With rapid economic and population growth, water scarcities and conflicts over the available water are becoming worse, while climate change makes the potential risk to society unpredictable. To deal with growing water scarcity and improve the quality of water, China's government launched a large-scale afforestation program in the Tibetan Plateau—the birthplace of Asia's primary rivers, which lies upstream of 40% of the world's population, at a high altitude and with fragile ecosystems. However, this program could aggravate the conflict for water between humans and nature, because tree plantations consume 1.7 × 109 m3 more water annually than the equivalent area of the region's natural vegetation. The shrinkage of glaciers caused by climate warming will exacerbate the water resource scarcity caused by these plantations and may soon become a primary source of conflict between regions that depend on river discharge from the plateau. To mitigate these problems, China's government should change its policy to conserve natural vegetation instead of planting more trees.

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