Water-Saving Solutions in Irrigated Agriculture: A Coded Database of 227 Documented Interventions

A hand-coded record of 227 interventions intended to reduce water use in irrigated agriculture, or to change how irrigation water is allocated, measured, priced or enforced. Each record carries its source, a grade describing what kind of source that is, a strict coding of whether any water outcome was actually measured, and a set of codes marking which design ingredients the intervention contains. The dataset was built to answer a question the sector's own reporting tends to obscure: of the interventions described as water-saving, how many report a measured fall in the volume of water withdrawn, as distinct from an improvement in efficiency. In this collection, 30 records report reduced abstraction, 41 report efficiency alone, 12 report a rebound, and 144 report no water outcome at all. Coverage is deliberately weighted toward Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and toward settings with severe groundwater decline. Read this before using it. The dataset is a purposive sample, not a census, and it was coded by a single analyst. Counts describe the documented public record, not the underlying population of interventions. The four gate fields are judgements about applicability to Saudi Arabia, not claims made by the sources. The codebook (CODEBOOK.md) states each limitation in full, and every one of them constrains what the data can support. Files: water-solutions-db.csv is the authoritative dataset (227 records, 24 fields, UTF-8). water-solutions-db.xlsx is the same records as a spreadsheet. CODEBOOK.md gives field definitions, coding rules and stated limitations. README.md describes the contents. CHANGELOG-v1.1.md records the changes from version 1.0. Version 1.1 (correction): seven text fields in three records (GW-12, GCC-37, MENA-40) were rewritten to match the wording of their cited sources, after a source-verification pass could not find the original statements on the cited pages. The record count (227), and every code, grade, mechanism and tier, are unchanged. Version 1.0 remains available unmodified.