Globally, more than 70% of the freshwater withdrawn from Earth’s surface or from underground is used to irrigate agricultural crops. Satellites reveal that extracting water doesn’t just affect the local environment – there are, in fact, knock-on consequences for many aspects of the Earth system. The latest findings, based on research carried out through ESA’s Science for Society Irrigation+ project, published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment offer a comprehensive description of the complex interplay between irrigation and the global environment.
The image on the left shows irrigated areas in a part of Southeast Asia. The spatial extent has been extracted from the enhanced global irrigated areas dataset that covers 1999–2012, processed by Meier, J et al. (2018). The image on the right is a land-cover classification map of the same region and is from the Land Cover 100 m global 2019 epoch map from the Copernicus Land Cover Service.
Read full story: Satellites unveil the far-reaching impact of irrigation