Drought has emerged as a planetary environmental crisis. Long experienced as episodic and locally occurring, recent trends show that in a changed climate and warming planet, drought is not limited to certain geography, but is spreading exponentially across continents, and becoming near chronic in vast areas.
In 2025, the world experienced the sixth most drought-affected year since 1950. Meteorological drought (severe moisture deficit) gripped 30 per cent of global land area. An analysis published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment estimates that the spread in 2025 was nearly three times that in the 1990s. Importantly, lack of rain is no longer the singular reason for a drought to evolve; events gripping the world currently see fundamental changes in formation, spread and impacts. The analysis concludes, “2025 drought was not an isolated anomaly but part of a broader post-2000 expansion of global drought extent, characterized by a rising baseline and increased inter-annual variability.”
There is now a clear established link between rising global warming and frequent drought spells. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has attributed climate change to increasing agricultural and ecological droughts. Studies show that atmospheric evaporative demand, which leads to moisture-less soils, has increased drought severity by an average of 40 per cent globally since 1901. Estimates forecast that droughts would cause around 3.2 million deaths worldwide by 2050.
In recent years, the world is waking up to this crisis. While there is no disagreement that drought is becoming increasingly economically and environmentally devastating, there is no unified global approach to fight this crisis.
There is, however, an effort to bring in an agreement on a global drought framework, under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). But progress is slow; in the just concluded Conference of Parties (COP17) to UNCCD in Ulaanbaatar, countries once again failed to agree on the framework despite it being under negotiations for last two years.
The drought framework, whether adopted as a legally binding protocol or a voluntary one, would formally shift countries from reactive to proactive drought management and help every party develop, update and implement a national drought plan. It would set up shared early-warning and monitoring systems capable of tracking not just rainfall but soil moisture, vulnerability and risk exposure; and would establish channels for countries to pool scientific and socio-economic data on drought. A formal agreement also means a formal mechanism to mobilise and direct finance toward drought resilience, at a moment when UNCCD estimates a US $278 billion annual gap between what is needed for land restoration and drought resilience and what is being invested.
But a small group of countries, prominently led by the US, oppose the protocol. The US argued that drought was fundamentally a domestic, bilateral or regional matter rather than one requiring a multilateral instrument.
“Incredibly, governments have failed to agree on an approach to tackling drought despite the ever-growing list of drought disasters around the world,” said Richard Lee of Wetlands International. The one concrete, structural decision that passed was to make drought a standalone agenda item at COP18 and at every ordinary session after that, guaranteeing it a permanent place on the agenda rather than ad-hoc treatment.
This article was originally published in the September 16-31, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth