By the end of 2025, roughly 30 per cent of the global land surface was gripped by drought — a near-tripling from the 10 per cent recorded in the 1990s, a new analysis published this week in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment journal revealed.
More critically, the data showed that the world was experiencing a fundamental transformation in how droughts form, move, and impact human civilisation. While drought has always been a natural part of the Earth’s climate, the most significant finding in the report was that droughts were no longer driven primarily by a lack of rainfall.
The study, which draws on the ERA5-Land dataset by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and multiple high-resolution climate indices, tracked drought extent and severity from 1950 through 2025.
The year 2025 ranked as the sixth most drought-affected year since 1950. Of the 30 per cent global land area affected by meteorological drought in 2025, roughly 1.2 per cent was affected by extreme drought — defined by particularly severe moisture deficits.
Researchers from Beijing Normal University, Qinghai Normal University, and Chinese Academy of Sciences in China, Boise State University in the United States of America (USA), and United Nations University Institute for Water in Canada showed how in the entire century from 1950 to 2019, the world had never seen drought cover exceed 30 per cent of the global land surface in a single year and how 2020 crossed that line.
The six-year period between 2020 and 2025 has been unprecedented and while the drought-affected area in 2025 remained lower than the five consecutive years from 2020 to 2024, the trend suggested that rather than retreating, drought stayed above or near that level for six straight years.
“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 interannual variability,” the paper, ‘Global Drought Extremes in 2025’, published on April 20, said.
A key finding of the study is a structural shift in the mechanisms driving drought. The driving mechanism of drought was transitioning from traditional precipitation deficits to a pattern dominated by ‘evaporative demand’ — even without extreme rainfall shortages.
In 2025, global land surface temperatures reached the third-highest level on record. This warming increased potential evapotranspiration — the atmosphere’s demand for water — leading to intensified evaporation from soils and vegetation.
Even the temporary cooling in 2025 by La Niña does not help reverse long-term trends.
This means that even under moderate precipitation anomalies, the warming has been pushing many regions to shift from a precipitation-limited drought pattern to one dominated by evaporation demands.
The drought’s footprint in 2025 was both widespread and severe, affecting all inhabited continents:
Africa: The region continued to reel under persistent drought since 2023, which has deepened food and water insecurity, with regions including Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Uganda experiencing prolonged drought conditions.
Asia: High-altitude regions, and particularly the Tibetan Plateau, which is often referred to as ‘the water tower’ of the continent, showed acute vulnerability to warming. Reduced snow accumulation and destabilised seasonal water storage contributed to widespread snow drought, threatening downstream water supplies for billions of people. In addition, drought conditions in Iran compounded a multi-year drying trend pushed Tehran toward high risk of failure of municipal water supply systems, a threshold that is also known as ‘Day Zero’.
Europe: Western Europe experienced one of its most intense compound heat-drought episodes since 1884, with the United Kingdom registering an exceptionally dry and hot spring-summer period.
South America: Eastern Amazonia and southern Brazil saw severe hydrological stress, with the Madeira river at multi-decadal lows and the Pantanal wetlands suffering dramatic reductions in surface water.
North America: Western North America was marked by reduced winter snowpack, elevated vapour pressure deficits, and extensive wildfire activity under prolonged heat and dryness.
Meanwhile, ‘extreme drought’ was concentrated in West Africa, eastern South America, western Europe, the Tibetan Plateau in Asia, and the Middle East.
Several major countries, including Iran, Brazil, the USA, Mexico, China, Argentina, Mongolia, and Canada, recorded among their lowest drought index values in decades. In some areas, such as the Gulf of Guinea, England, eastern North America, and western Canada, 2025 brought record-breaking drought conditions.