Wetland hydrological multifunctionality as a nature-based solution for improving agricultural water security

Agricultural water security is increasingly threatened by climate change and land use intensification. Wetlands, with their synergistic capacity to store, retain, infiltrate, purify, and release water (the SRIPR bundle), offer a vital nature-based solution to supporting agriculture. However, their potential remains largely unrealized due to inadequate tools for quantifying these coupled processes and optimizing their spatial design to support farming. In this study, we introduce the SRIPR framework as a new paradigm to bridge this gap. We outline a transformative research agenda: advancing models that capture SRIPR synergies, developing watershed-scale diagnostics to quantify agricultural water security benefits, and creating spatial optimization tools to design synergistic wetland-agriculture landscapes. Unlike previous wetland assessments that treat hydrological functions in isolation, the SRIPR framework provides the first mechanistic integration of these five processes as a synergistic bundle, coupled with a spatially explicit optimization architecture for reconciling wetland restoration with agricultural production. Through conceptual demonstration in typical paddy-wetland agricultural areas of western Jilin Province, China, the SRIPR framework indicates that strategic wetland network design could enhance irrigation reliability by 15-25% and reduce nitrate loads by 20-30%, while maintaining over 90% of current food production capacity. Implementing the SRIPR agenda is essential for transforming wetlands into strategic infrastructure that can underpin resilient, sustainable food systems, directly contributing to Sustainable Development Goals 2, 6, 13, and 15, whilst at the same time maintaining their tremendous ecological values.