Global Area Equipped for Irrigation Dataset 1900-2015
Creators
- 1. Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA
- 2. Department of Crop Sciences, University of Goettingen, Göttingen, Germany
- 3. Aalto University, Espoo, Finland
- 4. School of Economics and Resource Management, Beijing Normal University, China
- 5. School of Economics and Management, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Jiangxi, China
- 6. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
- 7. China Center for Agricultural Policy, School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
Description
The expansion of irrigated agriculture has increased global crop production but resulted in widespread stress to freshwater resources. Ensuring that increases in irrigated production only occur in places where water is relatively abundant is a key objective of sustainable agriculture, and knowledge of how irrigated land has evolved is important for measuring progress towards water sustainability. Yet a spatially detailed understanding of the evolution of global area equipped for irrigation (AEI) is missing. Here we utilize the latest sub-national irrigation statistics (covering 17298 administrative units) from various official sources to develop a gridded (5 arc-min resolution) global product of AEI for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015. We find that AEI increased by 11% from 2000 (297 Mha) to 2015 (330 Mha) with locations of both substantial expansion (e.g., northwest India, northeast China) and decline (e.g., Russia). Combining these outputs with information on green (i.e., rainfall) and blue (i.e., surface and ground) water stress, we also examine to what extent irrigation has expanded unsustainably (i.e., in places already experiencing water stress). We find that more than half (52%) of irrigation expansion has taken place in regions that were already water stressed, with India alone accounting for 36% of global unsustainable expansion. These findings provide new insights into the evolving patterns of global irrigation with important implications for global water sustainability and food security.
Recommended citation:
Mehta, P., Siebert, S., Kummu, M. et al. Half of twenty-first century global irrigation expansion has been in water-stressed regions. Nat Water (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00206-9
Open-access peer reviewed publication available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-024-00206-9
Files G_AEI_*.ASC were produced using the GMIA dataset[https://data.apps.fao.org/catalog/iso/f79213a0-88fd-11da-a88f-000d939bc5d8].
Files MEIER_G_AEI_*.ASC were produced using Meier et al. (2018) dataset [https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.884744].
Files
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Additional details
Related works
- Is published in
- Peer review: 10.1038/s44221-024-00206-9 (DOI)