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  • SPOTLIGHT

How to address agriculture’s water woes

Water isn’t the only challenge facing agriculture in a climate-altered future, but a lack of it could have catastrophic effects.
By
  1. Bianca Nogrady

    1. Bianca Nogrady is a freelance science journalist based in Sydney, Australia.

From the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s in North America to the droughts in Ethiopia in the 1980s, Australia in the early 2000s and Syria, Iraq and Iran in 2020, the spectre of water shortages has long hung over the world’s farmlands. When rain fails to arrive season after season, crops wither and cattle starve, and famine and conflict often follow. Climate change brings a whole new level of unpredictability to the rainfall that farmers rely on, either to water their crops directly, or to feed the rivers, lakes, ground water and snowpack from which they draw water for irrigation. And that means agriculture is having to adapt — quickly.

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Nature 630, S26-S27 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02037-w

This article is part of Nature Spotlight: Agricultural sciences, an editorially independent supplement. Advertisers have no influence over the content.

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