To support global‐scale assessments that are sensitive to agricultural land use, we developed the global data set of monthly irrigated and rainfed crop areas around the year 2000 (MIRCA2000). With a spatial resolution of 5 arc min (about 9.2 km at the equator), MIRCA2000 provides both irrigated and rainfed crop areas of 26 crop classes for each month of the year. The data set covers all major food crops as well as cotton. Other crops are grouped into categories (perennial, annual, and fodder grasses). It represents multicropping systems and maximizes consistency with census‐based national and subnational statistics. According to MIRCA2000, 25% of the global harvested areas are irrigated, with a cropping intensity (including fallow land) of 1.12, as compared to 0.84 for the sum of rainfed and irrigated harvested crops. For the dominant crops (rice (1.7 million km2 harvested area), wheat (2.1 million km2), and maize (1.5 million km2)), roughly 60%, 30%, and 20% of the harvested areas are irrigated, respectively, and half of the citrus, sugar cane, and cotton areas. While wheat and maize are the crops with the largest rainfed harvested areas (1.5 million km2 and 1.2 million km2, respectively), rice is clearly the crop with the largest irrigated harvested area (1.0 million km2), followed by wheat (0.7 million km2) and maize (0.3 million km2). Using MIRCA2000, 33% of global crop production and 44% of total cereal production were determined to come from irrigated agriculture.

Water scarcity severely impairs food security and economic prosperity in many countries today. Expected future population changes will, in many countries as well as globally, increase the pressure on available water resources. On the supply side, renewable water resources will be affected by projected changes in precipitation patterns, temperature, and other climate variables. Here we use a large ensemble of global hydrological models (GHMs) forced by five global climate models and the latest greenhouse-gas concentration scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways) to synthesize the current knowledge about climate change impacts on water resources. We show that climate change is likely to exacerbate regional and global water scarcity considerably. In particular, the ensemble average projects that a global warming of 2°C above present (approximately 2.7°C above preindustrial) will confront an additional approximate 15% of the global population with a severe decrease in water resources and will increase the number of people living under absolute water scarcity (<500 m 3 per capita per year) by another 40% (according to some models, more than 100%) compared with the effect of population growth alone. For some indicators of moderate impacts, the steepest increase is seen between the present day and 2°C, whereas indicators of very severe impacts increase unabated beyond 2°C. At the same time, the study highlights large uncertainties associated with these estimates, with both global climate models and GHMs contributing to the spread. GHM uncertainty is particularly dominant in many regions affected by declining water resources, suggesting a high potential for improved water resource projections through hydrological model development.F reshwater is one of the most vital natural resources of the planet. The quantities that humans need for drinking and sanitation are relatively small, and the fact that these basic needs are not satisfied for many people today is primarily a matter of access to, and quality of, available water resources (1). Much larger quantities of water are required for many other purposes, most importantly irrigated agriculture, but also for industrial use, in particular for hydropower and the cooling of thermoelectric power plants (2, 3). These activities critically depend on a sufficient amount of freshwater that can be withdrawn from rivers, lakes, and groundwater aquifers. Whereas scarcity of freshwater resources already constrains development and societal well-being in many countries (4, 5), the expected growth of global population over the coming decades, together with growing economic prosperity, will increase water demand and thus aggravate these problems (6-8).Climate change poses an additional threat to water security because changes in precipitation and other climatic variables may lead to significant changes in water supply in many regions (6-11). The effect of climate change on water resources is, however, uncertain for a number of reasons. Climate model projections, although rather ...

Irrigation is the most important water use sector accounting for about 70% of the global freshwater withdrawals and 90% of consumptive water uses. While the extent of irrigation and related water uses are reported in statistical databases or estimated by model simulations, information on the source of irrigation water is scarce and very scattered. Here we present a new global inventory on the extent of areas irrigated with groundwater, surface water or non-conventional sources, and we determine the related consumptive water uses. The inventory provides data for 15 038 national and sub-national administrative units. Irrigated area was provided by census-based statistics from international and national organizations. A global model was then applied to simulate consumptive water uses for irrigation by water source. Globally, area equipped for irrigation is currently about 301 million ha of which 38% are equipped for irrigation with groundwater. Total consumptive groundwater use for irrigation is estimated as 545 km³ yr⁻¹, or 43% of the total consumptive irrigation water use of 1277 km³ yr⁻¹. The countries with the largest extent of areas equipped for irrigation with groundwater, in absolute terms, are India (39 million ha), China (19 million ha) and the USA (17 million ha). Groundwater use in irrigation is increasing both in absolute terms and in percentage of total irrigation, leading in places to concentrations of users exploiting groundwater storage at rates above groundwater recharge. Despite the uncertainties associated with statistical data available to track patterns and growth of groundwater use for irrigation, the inventory presented here is a major step towards a more informed assessment of agricultural water use and its consequences for the global water cycle

Groundwater depletion (GWD) compromises crop production in major global agricultural areas and has negative ecological consequences. To derive GWD at the grid cell, country, and global levels, we applied a new version of the global hydrological model WaterGAP that simulates not only net groundwater abstractions and groundwater recharge from soils but also groundwater recharge from surface water bodies in dry regions. A large number of independent estimates of GWD as well as total water storage (TWS) trends determined from GRACE satellite data by three analysis centers were compared to model results. GWD and TWS trends are simulated best assuming that farmers in GWD areas irrigate at 70% of optimal water requirement. India, United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China had the highest GWD rates in the first decade of the 21st century. On the Arabian Peninsula, in Libya, Egypt, Mali, Mozambique, and Mongolia, at least 30% of the abstracted groundwater was taken from nonrenewable groundwater during this time period. The rate of global GWD has likely more than doubled since the period 1960-2000. Estimated GWD of 113 km 3 /yr during 2000-2009, corresponding to a sea level rise of 0.31 mm/yr, is much smaller than most previous estimates. About 15% of the globally abstracted groundwater was taken from nonrenewable groundwater during this period. To monitor recent temporal dynamics of GWD and related water abstractions, GRACE data are best evaluated with a hydrological model that, like WaterGAP, simulates the impact of abstractions on water storage, but the low spatial resolution of GRACE remains a challenge.