Correction to: Nature Reviews Earth & Environment https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00438-5, 20 June 2023.

In the version of the article initially published, the legend for Fig. 1 cited reference 24 instead of reference 42: Meier, J., Zabel, F. & Mauser, W. A global approach to estimate irrigated areas — a comparison between different data and statistics. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 22, 1119–1133 (2018). The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.