Targeting irrigation investments for people and planet: A novel big-data approach

Irrigated agriculture plays a foundational role for global food security while also being the largest water consumer worldwide. With little room to expand surface water irrigation, agricultural planners turn increasingly to groundwater for building climate resilience food security. This strategy has transformed major food baskets into highly productive but groundwater depleting systems. Outside these 'hotspots' however, there is still ample scope for promoting productive and sustainable groundwater use for agriculture. Here we present a big data approach for targeting groundwater irrigation investments in rice production across 4 states of India in safe shallow groundwater zones. Our results indicate that promoting one additional irrigation in parts of safe shallow groundwater zones where yield responses are especially high, can provide annual rice consumption needs for another 50m people. The spatial strucuture of the irrigation investment priority zones can further aid research and sustainable development planning. We conclude that combining increasingly abundant agronomic and hydrological data for sustainable development in low and middle income countries can help to guide the financing of more targeted and cost-effective sustainable development programs.