Virtual water trade and water footprint of agricultural goods: the 1961–2016 CWASI database

Abstract. To support national and global assessments of water use in agriculture, we build a comprehensive database country-specific footprint virtual trade (VWT) data for 370 agricultural goods. The footprint, indicating the needed production good including rainwater from surface groundwater bodies, is expressed as volume per unit weight (or uWF) here estimated at country scale every year period 1961–2016. uWF also differentiated, where possible, between supply, referring to local weighted mean import, respectively. VWT data, representing amount virtually exchanged with international trade, are provided each commodity bilateral matrices, origin destination countries, 1986–2016. database, developed within CWASI project, improves upon earlier datasets because it takes into account annual variability crops, accounts both produced imported goods definition supply-side uWF, traces across up goods' production. available on Zenodo repository https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4606794 (Tamea et al., 2020), welcomes contributions improvements research community enable analyses specifically accounting temporal evolution uWF.