An increasing population in conjunction with a changing climate necessitates a detailed understanding of water abundance at multiple spatial and temporal scales. While remote sensing has provided massive data volumes to track fluctuations in water quantity, contextualizing water abundance with other local, regional, and global trends remains challenging, because of requirements for large computational resources to combine multiple data sources into an analytically-friendly format. To bridge this gap and to facilitate future freshwater research opportunities, we present the Global lake area, climate, and population (GLCP) dataset. The GLCP is a compilation of lake surface area for over 1.42 million lakes and reservoirs from 1995 to 2015 with co-located basin-level temperature, precipitation, and population data. The GLCP was created with FAIR data principles in mind by retaining unique identifiers from parent datasets to expedite interoperability. The GLCP offers critical data for basic and applied investigations of lake surface area, and water quantity in general, at local, regional, and global scales.