Some of the most widespread and damaging drought events in recorded history have taken place between 2023 and 2025, an United Nations-backed report launched on July 2, 2025 found.
These unprecedented droughts were fuelled by the hottest global temperatures ever recorded and have devastated critical regions across continents, with effects continuing into 2025.
Southern and eastern Africa, the Amazon Basin, southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, Panama and Mexico were the hardest-hit drought hotspots. These regions witnessed challenges ranging from deaths due to drought-linked hunger and famine, mass human displacement to
water supply collapse, agricultural failures and energy blackouts.
The report Drought Hotspots Around the World 2023-2025 was prepared by the US National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), with support from the International Drought Resilience Alliance (IDRA), was launched during IDRA’s event at the ongoing 4th International Conference on Finance for Development in Seville, Spain.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2023 and 2024 were the two warmest years on record globally, with El Niño-Southern Oscillation, influencing the global drought. The impact was widespread and devastating:
• In Somalia, the government estimated that 43,000 people died in 2022 alone due to drought-linked hunger. As of early 2025, 4.4 million people — a quarter of the population — face crisis-level food insecurity, including 784,000 expected to reach emergency levels.
• Venezuela shattered wildfire records with over 30,000 fire points in early 2024, while Manaus, Brazil, was blanketed in toxic smoke for weeks.
• Water shortages in Spain hit agriculture, tourism, and domestic supply. By September 2023, two years of drought and record heat caused a 50 per cent drop in Spain’s olive crop.
• Sheep population in Morocco was 38 per cent smaller in 2025 relative to 2016 .
• Record-low river levels in Amazon basin in 2023 and 2024 led to mass deaths of fish and endangered dolphins, and disrupted drinking water and transport for hundreds of thousands.
• Water levels in Panama Canal dropped so low that transits were slashed by over one-third, causing major global trade disruptions.
“Drought is no longer a distant threat. It is here, escalating, and demands urgent global cooperation. When energy, food, and water all go at once, societies start to unravel. That’s the new normal we need to be ready for,” UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw said.
In the Amazon region, the drought of 2023-2024 was considered unprecedented and possibly the most severe, widespread drought. Nine countries in the Amazon basin experienced extremely high temperatures and their lowest rainfall in 40 years during 2023, the report said.
The 2023 drought led to the Brazilian Amazon biome losing 3.3 million hectares of surface water relative to 2022, and the Amazon River losing nearly 60 per cent of its surface water, the most of any Brazilian state. It was attributed to a combination of El Nino, which commonly causes severe droughts in the Amazon, and human-induced climate change.
Wildfires also surged as a critical threat across the Amazon during the 2023-2024 drought. In October 2023 alone, nearly 3,000 wildfires raged through Brazil’s Amazonas state, engulfing vast areas and blanketing the region’s largest city, Manaus, in thick, hazardous smoke, the report said.
The report warned that droughts are expected to worsen in the Amazon basin, with recent estimates suggesting that, by 2050, up to 47 per cent of the Amazon rainforest will be threatened by drought and wildfire.
Drought and heatwaves across India and Thailand, two of the world’s leading sugar producers, led to sharp declines in sugar output with sugar prices reaching their highest levels in over a decade.
In Thailand, sugar harvest fell by 12.4 per cent due to the 2023-2024 El Niño. This shortage fuelled an 8.9 per cent increase in the cost of sweets and sugar products in the United States over the past year, the report noted.
Across southeast Asia, one of the fastest-warming regions globally, other staple crops like rice and coffee were also hit hard. By November 2023, Indonesia, the region’s largest economy, was forced to import rice from Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan and Myanmar to compensate for losses caused by extreme El Niño-related drought conditions.
Between August and October 2023, rising rice prices became the top driver of inflation in Indonesia, pushing the government to deliver rice aid to over 21 million families and financial assistance to nearly 19 million more.
Coffee production, too, was severely disrupted. In Vietnam, the world’s largest producer of Robusta coffee, the 2023-24 harvest shrunk by 20 per cent amid heat, drought and pest outbreaks. This pushed robusta futures to record highs in April 2024, according to the report.
“Warning signs of a poor robusta harvest emerged again in June 2024 as Vietnamese coffee trees were stunted by heat, drought, and a pest that thrives in such conditions,” it said.
The Coffee and Cocoa Association of Vietnam predicted that the 2024-2025 harvest will be 15-20 per cent below average.
The Panama Canal, a crucial maritime passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and handling around 5 per cent of the world’s annual international shipping traffic, faced low water levels in its reservoirs due to severe drought conditions.
Between February and April 2023, rainfall fell by half of normal levels. By May 2023, these diminished water levels forced authorities to impose strict shipping restrictions, requiring vessels to reduce their cargo loads by up to 40 per cent to safely navigate the canal’s shallow waters.
As the summer progressed, water shortages worsened, leading to even tighter weight limits and financial penalties for non-compliance and pushing Panama to urgently search for new water sources by September to keep the canal operational, the report found.
Compared to the normal 38 ships allowed per day to pass through the canal, only 24 were being allowed due to the drought as shipments, which used to take eight to 10 hours to pass through it, were taking one to two weeks.
"This is a slow-moving global catastrophe, the worst I've ever seen. This report underscores the need for systematic monitoring of how drought affects lives, livelihoods and the health of the ecosystems that we all depend on,” Mark Svoboda, report co-author and NDMC founding director, said in a statement released by UNCCD.
The authors called for urgent investments in drought preparedness, including stronger early warning systems and real-time drought and drought impact monitoring. It also recommended implementing nature-based solutions such as watershed restoration and indigenous crop use, and a global cooperation, especially in protecting transboundary river basins and trade routes.
“The nations of the world have the resources and the knowledge to prevent a lot of suffering,” said report co-author Kelly Helm Smith, NDMC assistant director and drought impacts researcher. “The question is, do we have the will?”