ArticleNature communications2021
Irrigated areas drive irrigation water withdrawals.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Global crop-specific energy demand for irrigation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Widely cited global irrigation statistics lack empirical support.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- A High-Resolution Gridded Dataset for China's Monthly Sectoral Water Use.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Global water gaps under future warming levels.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Correlating grain yield with irrigation in a spatio-temporal context on the North China Plain.Heliyon · 2024Article
- Global impacts of heat and water stress on food production and severe food insecurity.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Global energy use and carbon emissions from irrigated agriculture.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Models with higher effective dimensions tend to produce more uncertain estimates.Science advances · 2022Article
- Review
- The delusive accuracy of global irrigation water withdrawal estimates.Nature communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A sustainable management of global freshwater resources requires reliable estimates of the water demanded by irrigated agriculture. This has been attempted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) through country surveys and censuses, or through Global Models, which compute irrigation water withdrawals with sub-models on crop types and calendars, evapotranspiration, irrigation efficiencies, weather data and irrigated areas, among others. Here we demonstrate that these strategies err on the side of excess complexity, as the values reported by FAO and outputted by Global Models are largely conditioned by irrigated areas and their uncertainty. Modelling irrigation water withdrawals as a function of irrigated areas yields almost the same results in a much parsimonious way, while permitting the exploration of all model uncertainties. Our work offers a robust and more transparent approach to estimate one of the most important indicators guiding our policies on water security worldwide.
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Registered trials
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