Large-scale irrigation is one of the land management practices with the largest effect on climate conditions -- and especially hot extremes -- in various regions across the globe. Yet how the climatic effects of irrigation compare to those of global warming is largely unknown. Over South Asia, irrigation locally reduced the likelihood of hot extremes by a factor of 2 -- 8, with particularly strong effects over the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Around one billion people currently benefit from this dampened increase in hot extremes because irrigation massively expanded -- it more than quadrupled in area -- throughout the 20th century. These results therefore highlight that irrigation substantially reduced human exposure to warming of hot extremes.

Source: The North Africa Journal January 15, 2020 17:26 UTC