The Yarlung Zangbo River (YZR) is the largest river system in the Tibetan Plateau, and its basin is one of the centers of human economic activity in Tibet. Large uncertainties exist in several previous climate change studies in this basin because of limited climate observations. In this paper, we used a meteorological drought index (Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index, SPEI) and a newly-released gridded climate forcing dataset based on high-quality climate station data to re-evaluate climate change in the YZR Basin during the period of 1961–2014. Results showed that precipitation experienced a statistically insignificant increasing trend at a rate of 6.32 mm/10 years, and its annual mean was 512.40 mm. The basin was sensitive to climate change in terms of the air temperature that significantly increased at the rate of 0.32 °C/10 years. This warming rate was obviously larger than that in many other regions. Analysis of SPEI showed that the basin had no obvious statistical trends in the number of dry/wet episodes, but the severity of dry episode aggravated in terms of duration and magnitude. This study provides a reliable analysis of climate change in the YZR Basin, and suggests this large Tibetan river basin is sensitive to climate change.

The withdrawal of homesteads is an effective way to improve the efficiency of rural construction land use and is being piloted in many regions of China, but the mechanism influencing farmers’ satisfaction with the withdrawal policy is unclear. This paper aimed to investigate the relationships among farmers’ economic status (ES), policy expectation (PE), policy perceived value (PPV), and farmers’ satisfaction with homestead withdrawal policy (policy satisfaction; PS). The study examined the mediating effects of PE and PPV on the relationship between ES and PS. The data obtained from a questionnaire of 287 households in Jinhu County, Jiangsu Province, China. After surviving from reliability and validity tests, a structural equation modeling (SEM) with latent variables was specified and estimated using Mplus. From the study results, we found significant positive relationships between ES, PP, and PS, but significant negative relationships between ES, PE, PPV, and PS. Also, our research found PE and PPV as potential mediators on ES-PS relation. We propose recommendations from three aspects to improve farmers’ satisfaction with future implementations of the homestead withdrawal policy. Our results provided new insights into how to improve the performance of homestead withdrawal policy.