Impact of climate change on the eco-environment in the Yellow River Source

Eco-environment has been disturbed severely in the Yellow River source by global climatic change and human activity. Currently, it had been gotten people’s close concern on impact of climate change on eco-environment in source region of Yellow River. Based on the analysis and systematic summary of the research results at home and abroad in recent years, authors concluded the climate change characteristics and key problem of the eco-environmental, and gave a comprehensive analysis of the main problems from runoff, soil erosion, wetlands, permafrost and vegetation in the Yellow River source, and discussed the characters of the effect of climatic change on eco-environment. Above all, authors had provided the main strategy of the eco-environment protection in the Yellow River source. The results were as follows: The precipitation was slightly increased, but the temperature was significantly increased in the Yellow River source region; It was great variation that the inter-annual variation and inter-decadal variation for runoff in the Yellow River source region. The runoff was in ample flow period from the middle of 1960s to the late of 1970s and in low water period from the early 1990s to 2008, and the good correlativity was between the annual runoff anomaly and annual precipitation anomaly, and the precipitation intensity was another important cause for runoff volume; The Yellow River source was the region with severe soil erosion, and the wetland was seriously damaged with an obvious decreasing area and dominance and increasing the number of patch, fragmentation degree and fractal dimension; The source region of permafrost had been thinned or disappeared, and there were formed inconsistently frozen ground and residual thawed layers in the vertical profile in the fringe, and raised 50~70 m in the lower limit of permafrost distribution; In general the vegetation cover was preserved previous condition or partially degraded in the Yellow River source. Therefore, we should consummate ecological compensation mechanism, strengthen the construction of a legal system and social environmental awareness, improve the quality of the law enforcement contingent, strengthen the joint of different departments, implement the ecological immigration, and advocate improving the ecotourism to protect the ecological environment of the Yellow River source.