City‐Level Virtual Groundwater Flows in Northern China and the Effect of Agricultural Relocation on Alleviating Groundwater Scarcity.

North China faces severe groundwater overdraft because of unsustainable groundwater use. However, consumers of local groundwater have rarely been precisely delineated. As such, identifying external consumers of groundwater‐intensive products may promote targeted policies from the consumption side, especially for the most water‐scarce Beijing‐Tianjin‐Hebei (BTH) metropolitan area, which has important links to food security and groundwater overdraft across North China. In this study, we revealed the prefecture city‐level virtual groundwater flows in the BTH region for, to our knowledge, the first time by compiling a nested multiregional input‐output table with 13 BTH cities and 28 Chinese provinces outside BTH in 2012. Our results showed that >50% of groundwater use in BTH cities was driven by agricultural supply for outside provinces, significantly exceeding the local demand of 38.8%. In addition, we simulated different scenarios that focused on redistributing the original agricultural production of the BTH region to other northern provinces. We found that these redistribution strategies would lead to 13%–67% groundwater savings relative to total groundwater use in the BTH region in 2012. Moreover, our results also indicated that BTH cities would save groundwater under higher stress in exchange for increased groundwater use in provinces under lower stress. These findings can be utilized to optimize the agricultural distribution and groundwater conservation policies in other regions or countries facing agriculture‐induced groundwater overdraft issues. Plain Language Summary: The local groundwater resources are influenced by distant consumers who would also lead to groundwater overdraft through interregional trade. The sources of severe groundwater overdraft in North China are not clear. Through combing multiregional input‐output (MRIO) table at city level of Beijing‐Tianjin‐Hebei (BTH) region (which located in North China Plain) with the MRIO at provincial level of China, our study assessed the virtual groundwater flows for cities of BTH. Our results show that groundwater overdraft of BTH is driven by distant consumption of agricultural products from other provinces. To mitigate this trade‐driven groundwater overdraft, we designed scenarios to show that importing or self‐market of agricultural products rather than export would get significant groundwater saving. In addition, adopting this virtual water strategy would decrease groundwater use of BTH with higher stress and increase groundwater use with lower stress in other provinces. Restricting export of agricultural products from BTH would be great helpful for mitigating groundwater overdraft of this region and bring about little harm to other provinces. Key Points: The groundwater scarcity of cities in Northern China is mainly trade‐driven and 51.1% of groundwater use is due to interprovincial exportsAgricultural relocation can significantly mitigate groundwater scarcity of the North cities with little harm for other regions [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]