Soil erosion threatens soil health, water resources, and ecosystem sustainability, impacting global sustainable development goals (SDGs) achievement. The Loess Plateau, historically plagued by severe soil erosion, has improved due to the Grain for Green Program implementation. However, the relative contributions of human activities and climate change to these improvements remain poorly quantified, limiting transferability of this success to other regions. To address this gap, we employed residual analysis to quantify human activities and climate change impacts on vegetation greening, combined with the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) to estimate soil erosion rates. Furthermore, partial differential equations calculate individual erosion factor contributions. Results indicate that since 2000, 54 % of the Loess Plateau experienced greening, with climate change accounting for 64.7 % of observed vegetation variation. Mean annual soil erosion rate was 7.38 t/(ha center dot a), reduced by 2.49 t/(ha center dot a) (approximately 28.9 %). Among reduction driving factors, greening contributed -5.31 t/(ha center dot a), increased precipitation accounted for 2.73 t/(ha center dot a), and land cover changes contributed 0.09 t/(ha center dot a). Human activities were the dominate driving factor for soil erosion rate decrease, responsible for 77.1 %, while climate change contributed 22.9 %. These findings underscore the dominant role of human-led interventions in mitigating soil erosion, and provide valuable insights for policymakers and water resource managers, demonstrating potential to replicate the Loess Plateau success in other erosion-prone regions.