Global Major Water Transfer Projects Dataset

Water transfer projects (WTPs) profoundly alter water availability and have far-reaching effects on the environments, economies, and sustainable development in water donor and recipient regions, and along water conveyance corridors. Despite their growing importance, global assessments of WTPs remain constrained by fragmented records, inconsistent attribute definitions, and limited spatial representations of project components. By integrating multi-source WTPs reports and auxiliary geospatial data, we developed spatially explicit datasets that provied a global inventory of major water transfer projects (MWTPs). Organized within a standardized data structure, these datasets document the project characteristics, geospatial details, and functional attributes of 435 MWTPs, alongside spatial layers for water transfer routes, intake locations, and project-associated influence regions. By linking engineering attributes with point–line–polygon spatial features, the database supports a consistent comparison of major water transfer systems across regions. The dataset can provide unified information for global and regional hydrological cycle simulations, water environmental impact assessments, and sustainable water resource management practices.