International corporations trading Brazilian soy are keystone actors for water stewardship

Abstract Transnational corporations play a major, but poorly constrained, role in reallocating global water resources. Here, we couple high-resolution, company-specific trade data with hydrological and crop models to estimate the virtual of top 9 transnational that Brazilian soy. We identify 4429 flows connecting 1620 municipalities top-10 soy importing countries find total flow increased from 43 billion m 3 100 between 2004 2018. largest traders displace on average twice as much top-importing countries, excluding China. For example, 2018 one corporation exported 15 Gm , almost tripling Netherlands’s import (the second importer at about 5 ). Our findings highlight importance for achieving stewardship sustainable supply chains support resource security municipal international scales.