Tracking agricultural water footprint and virtual water trade across global food systems over the period 1961–2023

Assessing freshwater resilience requires understanding how hydrological resources are embedded within coupled social and ecological systems. Global food production and trade play a central role in redistributing freshwater resources across regions, linking local water availability, ecosystem pressures, and societal demand through virtual water flows. Robust, long-term, and transparent datasets are therefore essential to support integrated assessments of freshwater resilience across scales.

Here we present the CWASI 2.0 dataset, an updated open-access database of global agricultural water footprints and virtual water trade. The database provides country-level, annually resolved estimates for over 300 food products over the 1961–2023 period, thereby enabling the analysis of long-term dynamics in freshwater use and redistribution through global food systems.

As in the original CWASI framework, time-varying unit water footprints are applied to FAO-derived production and reconciled bilateral trade data to compute annual virtual water trade matrices and export volumes, but with CWASI 2.0 several significant advancements have been introduced. Firstly, the temporal coverage of the original open-access database has been extended, from 2016 to 2023, providing the most up-to-date publicly accessible dataset of its kind. Secondly, the modelling framework has been enhanced by refining the description of food value chains: re-exports are now modelled with an updated tracing algorithm, food loss and waste material flows are described, and crops are dynamically allocated to animal diets according to historical trends. Thirdly, unit water footprints are now explicitly decomposed into green water (rainwater) and blue water (surface and groundwater) components, allowing for differentiated assessments. 

Collectively, these advancements lead to greater consistency and finer granularity in the estimation of both water footprints and virtual water flows, offering a robust data foundation which is able to capture recent shifts in global trade patterns and climate variability, allowing to study emerging vulnerabilities and adaptive responses within the freshwater–society–ecology nexus.