Global Area Equipped for Irrigation Dataset 1900-2015

Beskrivning

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. Please refer to the data descriptor (preprint) available at https://doi.org/10.31223/X5C932 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].
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Publiceringsår

2023

Typ av data

Upphovspersoner

Department of Built Environment

Kyle Frankel Davis - Upphovsperson

Landon Marston - Upphovsperson

Matti Kummu Orcid -palvelun logo - Upphovsperson

Piyush Mehta - Upphovsperson

Qinyu Deng - Upphovsperson

Stefan Siebert - Upphovsperson

Tariq Ali - Upphovsperson

Wei Xie - Upphovsperson

Beijing Normal University - Medarbetare

Jiangxi Agricultural University - Medarbetare

Peking University - Medarbetare

University of Delaware - Medarbetare

University of Göttingen - Medarbetare

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University - Medarbetare

Zenodo - Utgivare

Projekt

Övriga uppgifter

Vetenskapsområden

Miljöteknik

Språk

Öppen tillgång

Öppet

Licens

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Nyckelord

Ämnesord

Temporal täckning

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