The continuous loss of lake water resources has become one of the main problems affecting the economic and social development in semi-arid areas. However, due to the lack of long-term continuous monitoring data of lake dynamics, the process of lake water resources loss and its relationship with climate change and economic and social development in this area have not been evaluated in detail. To solve this problem, this paper takes Lake Daihai, which is located in a semi-arid area, as the research object, using the improved normalized difference water body index to extract the boundary of lake water body from 258 Landsat remote sensing images from 1986 to 2020, and reconstructs the dynamic change process of water resources in Lake Daihai for last 60 years by integrating lake water level data. The results show that from 1961 to 2019, the Lake Daihai shrank sharply, and the lake water volume decreased by 9.88×10⁸ m³. At the same time, the fitting results of the piecewise function of the water volume change trend show that the water volume change of Lake Daihai can be divided into three stages:from 1961 to 1978, the slow loss stage with the water loss rate of 0.726×10⁷ m³/a; from 1979 to 2004, the rapid loss stage with the water loss rate of 2.10×10⁷ m³/a; from 2005 to 2019, the accelerated loss stage with the water loss rate of 3.39×10⁷ m³/a. Correlation analysis shows that the loss of water volume of Lake Daihai is closely related to the economic and social development of the river basin. Among them, the increase in the scale and intensity of agricultural development and utilization in the watershed after the reform and opening-up is the main reason for the loss of water volume of the Lake Daihai; the rise of the industrial economy after the implementation of the "Western Development" strategy accelerated the loss of water volume of the Lake Daihai. Accordingly, this study suggests that the economic and social development of lake basins in arid and semi-arid regions should be coordinated with their water resource carrying capacity.