**1. Introduction**

Sustainable food production involves the sustained availability of resources, such as water and energy, to agriculture. The key challenges to sustainable food production are population increase, availability of resources at the right time and place, threats posed by climate variability and extremes to land and water which are often exacerbated by other biophysical limits such as declining per-capita land and water scarcity, as well as rising demand for agricultural products [1,2]. The emerging consensus is that the world likely will exceed nine billion people by 2050, requiring 70%, 80%, and 55%, more food, water, and energy, respectively [3–5]. Increasing agricultural productivity and developing sustainable water management techniques are needed to feed the ever-increasing population [1,6]. Projected climate change is expected to affect crop and livestock production substantially, and water availability and quality. Climate change and variability, as well as extremes, including floods and droughts, further aggravate the challenges to sustainable food production. Innovative strategies are needed to mitigate these negative impacts while meeting the increasing demands in a sustainable manner [7].

Efficient and smart use of resources, and the adoption of less water-intensive crop production systems, are the present requirements to achieve sustainable food production. Advanced crop production methods such as precision farming, access to low-cost data, advancement in electronic gadgets, and smart instruments have opened up plenty of opportunities for agricultural producers to gear up towards sustainable food production. However, the knowledge of managing water in agriculture with existing technology has not reached many parts of the world. Therefore, this special issue is developed to bring out the knowledge on water management towards sustainable food production in an open-access platform.

This Special Issue aims to bring forth the challenges and discuss the mitigation options on the availability of water to both rain-fed and irrigated agricultural production (including animal production) to sustain food production at local, regional, national, and global scales.

In particular, the Special Issue focused on:


In this introductory article, we highlight the major findings from papers published in this collection. A summary of the articles in the special issue is presented in Table 1. This Edited Collection, "Water Management for Sustainable Food Production," includes fifteen articles (thirteen are research articles, two review articles). These studies cover a wide range of topics related to water management for various crop production systems in different parts of the world.


