AbstractThe Yellow River Basin (YRB) as a source of the oldest world cultures, flows through vast arid and semi‐arid regions of China. Its fragile vegetation is suffering the obvious effect from regional climate change, and easily turns from a critical state into qualitatively different modes of change, which implies significant impacts on humans and ecosystems. Our results show that in the period of 1982–2015, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) appeared significantly discontinuous changes by stagnant warming and strengthening wetting, especially in the central YRB (104.5°–111° E, 35.5°–38° N). The NDVI in this region shifted from slowly increasing (5.42 × 10−4 a−1) to rapidly increasing (5.13 × 10−3 a−1) around 2003, called the turning point (TP). Such shift change is mainly a result of increased moderate rain, with frequency trend changed from 0.083 times·a−1 to 0.324 times·a−1. Meanwhile, these changes on vegetation led to a reversal of the gross primary productivity (GPP) from decreasing to increasing. Such results indicated the vulnerable ecosystem of the central YRB has played a positive contribution to the carbon balance, and more sustainable management of vegetation is required for the ecological development and engaging adaptive strategy.