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Environmental science

Eating ourselves dry

Nature volume 543, pages 633–634 (2017)Cite this article

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Do human consumption habits affect groundwater depletion as a result of international food trade? A global analysis indicates that they do, and shows which products and countries have the biggest impact. See Letter p.700

Groundwater levels are being depleted at alarming rates in the world's arid and semi-arid regions, mostly because of farm irrigation that has been implemented over the past 50 years with little planning or control by governmental agencies1. Such irrigation measures have brought numerous socio-economic benefits and are generally less prone to corruption than are surface-water irrigation projects, but they have also led to ecological damage such as land subsidence, seawater intrusion into coastal areas and the loss of springs and wetlands2. These problems seem to be partly related to the international export and consumption of commodities3,4. On page 700, Dalin and colleagues5 report the first quantification of global, non-renewable groundwater depletion associated with irrigation that is embedded in the world's food trade.

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Figure 1: Top ten exporters and importers of groundwater depletion embedded in the food trade.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Maite M. Aldaya is at the Water Observatory, Madrid 28001, Spain.,

    Maite M. Aldaya

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  1. Maite M. Aldaya
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Correspondence to Maite M. Aldaya.

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https://doi.org/10.1038/516179

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Aldaya, M. Eating ourselves dry. Nature 543, 633–634 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/543633a

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