Water resource carrying capacity is an important indicator for measuring sustainable development. Given the rapid economic and social development in China today, coordinating the sustainable development of water resources, socio-economy, and eco-environment has become an urgent problem to be solved. This study takes the Gansu section of Wei River mainstream basin (GWRB) as a case study and constructs a three-dimensional WRCC evaluation system and status standards. Based on this research framework, we analyzed the trends in WRCC changes of GWRB from 2008 to 2022. Additionally, we conducted an in-depth study of the internal relationships and influencing factors within the WRCC system. The results show that the combination weighting method of multi-weight models avoids the one-sidedness of single weighting, leading to a more realistic distribution of weights. The result status standard derived from the indicator status standard prevents a disconnect between the result and the status, making the evaluation more rational and accurate. The WRCC of the GWRB increased from 0.098 (overloaded) in 2008 to 0.621 (weakly bearable) in 2022. During this period, the eco-environmental system improved from critical to bearable, while the socio-economic system improved from overloaded to weakly bearable. Due to geographical and climatic limitations, the water resource system continued to bear significant pressure and remained in overloaded state for most of the time. The key factors limiting the further improvement of WRCC in the GWRB are per capita water resources, utilization rate of water resources, COD emission per 10,000 yuan of GDP, ecological water use rate, water consumption per 10,000 GDP and agricultural water use rate. To improve the WRCC, we propose a series of targeted recommendations based on the research findings. The proposed research framework can also serve as a reference for related studies in arid and semi-arid regions.

Groundwater research on climate change is one of the significant topics in the field of natural sciences that is receiving increasing attention. However, no bibliometric research papers have been published that have analyzed the field for relevant knowledge graphs and relational networks. R-Bibliometrix and VOSviewer software are used to quantitatively analyze and visually represent the literature on the research of groundwater under climate change from 2010 to 2024 based on the Web of Science Core Collection. The findings demonstrated that a total of 4748 articles have been published on this topic, with publications increasing yearly. The most influential journal was the Journal of Hydrology, and the ten most influential papers were published from 2013 to 2017. The United States and China published significantly more research than any other country and had the closest cooperation, while Europe is the continent with the most publications. The Chinese Academy of Sciences was the leading institution in terms of the number of publications, and the Delft University of Technology was the institution with the highest average number of citations. British scholar Chris Soulsby was the author with the highest number of articles. The top three keywords were ‘climate change’, ‘groundwater’, and ‘model’. Machine-learning methods and remote-sensing techniques were emerging research hotspots that guided future research directions.