Global expansion of sustainable irrigation limited by water storage

Abstract

Providing affordable and nutritious food to a growing and increasingly affluent global population requires multifaceted approaches to target supply and demand aspects. On the supply side, expanding irrigation is key to increase future food production, yet associated needs for storing water and implications of providing that water storage, remain unknown. Here, we quantify biophysical potentials for storage-fed sustainable irrigation—irrigation that neither depletes freshwater resources nor expands croplands but requires water to be stored before use—and study implications for food security and infrastructure. We find that water storage is crucial for future food systems because 460 km 3 /yr of sustainable blue water, enough to grow food for 1.15 billion people, can only be used for irrigation after storage. Even if all identified future dams were to contribute water to irrigation, water stored in dammed reservoirs could only supply 209 ± 50 km 3 /yr to irrigation and grow food for 631 ± 145 million people. In the face of this gap and the major socioecologic externalities from future dams, our results highlight limits of gray infrastructure for future irrigation and urge to increase irrigation efficiency, change to less water-intensive cropping systems, and deploy alternative storage solutions at scale.