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Large-scale reforestation can potentially bring both benefits and risks to the water cycle, which needs to be better quantified under future climates to inform reforestation decisions. We identified 477 water-insecure basins worldwide accounting for 44.6% (380.2 Mha) of the global reforestation potential. As many of these basins are in the Asia-Pacific, we used regional coupled land-climate modeling for the period 2041-2070 to reveal that reforestation increases evapotranspiration and precipitation for most water-insecure regions over the Asia-Pacific. This resulted in a statistically significant increase in water yield (p < .05) for the Loess Plateau-North China Plain, Yangtze Plain, Southeast China, and Irrawaddy regions. Precipitation feedback was influenced by the degree of initial moisture limitation affecting soil moisture response and thus evapotranspiration, as well as precipitation advection from other reforested regions and moisture transport away from the local region. Reforestation also reduces the probability of extremely dry months in most of the water-insecure regions. However, some regions experience nonsignificant declines in net water yield due to heightened evapotranspiration outstripping increases in precipitation, or declines in soil moisture and advected precipitation., (© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Summary The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) has been computed based on the monthly precipitation for different observed and modelled datasets over the Central Highland, Vietnam during the period 1990–2005. Station data from a total of 13 stations were collected from the study region and used for benchmarking to compare gridded observation data and two regional climate models (RCMs). Various characteristics of drought across the study region were analyzed using spatial and temporal distributions, number of drought events, their frequency and their deficit. The RCMs were able to capture the SPI temporal distributions of station data fairly well. The analysis from RCMs showed close estimation for the number of drought events to station data and gridded observations. In terms of Drought Deficit and frequency, the RCMs matched the station data better than gridded observations. The drought trend was carried out using a Modified Mann–Kendall trend test which yielded no clear trends that suggested the need for longer records of data. The results also highlight uncertainties in gridded data and the need for robust station data quality and record lengths. The regional climate models proved to be appropriate tools in assessing drought over the study area as they can serve as good proxies over data sparse regions, especially in developing countries, for studying detailed climate features at sub regional and local scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]