Climate change and human activities comprehensively affect runoff processes, so the dynamic change of runoff along with its attribution identification and quantitative characterization are of great significance to the development and management of regional water resources. In this paper, taking Jialu River Basin as the study area, Mann-Kendall trend test and orderly clustering method were used to analyze the characteristics of the changes of hydrologic elements in the study area, and the elastic coefficient method based on Budyko water-energy balance equation was used to quantitatively analyze the response of runoff to each driving factor. The results showed that there was no significant change in precipitation and potential evapotranspiration, but the runoff showed a significant decreasing trend and an abrupt change occurred in 1978 with a relative change rate of -58.5% compared with the base period. Human activities and climate change together caused a sharp decrease in runoff in the basin, and the contribution rates of human activities, precipitation and potential evapotranspiration to runoff change were 77.54%, 21.31% and 1.15%, respectively.