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As a strengthening El Niño threatens to bring more extreme conditions across parts of the world well into 2027, governments globally are confronting a drought risk that has outgrown the way it has traditionally been managed.
Drought can no longer be treated as a periodic agricultural or environmental crisis to be dealt with once it strikes — it must instead be managed as a persistent risk to entire economies, one that can affect food and water security, energy, public health, transport, tourism and trade, according to senior United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) officials.
Nor does the risk stop at international borders. In an interconnected world, drought affecting the Panama Canal can have consequences for trade as far away as Asia, while drought in the Nile basin can disrupt grain supplies reaching countries elsewhere in Africa.
Yet countries have still not agreed on how that risk should be managed collectively. At UNCCD COP17 in Mongolia in August 2026, governments again failed to reach consensus on a global framework for drought, leaving unresolved what form international cooperation should take.
For decades, however, drought management has largely remained reactive. Countries prepare plans for what to do when drought strikes, rather than systematically assessing who and what is at risk and reducing those vulnerabilities beforehand, said Daniel Tsegai, programme officer, Drought Resilience, UNCCD.
The scale of what is at stake is stark. UNCCD’s World Drought Atlas had earlier projected that roughly three in four people worldwide will be affected by drought by 2050, mapping how that risk cascades through energy, trade, and agriculture.
By the end of 2025, close to 30 per cent of the world’s land surface was in drought — nearly triple the roughly 10 per cent recorded through the 1990s — according to an analysis of more than seven decades of climate data published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment earlier in 2026.
No inhabited continent was spared: Persistent drought deepened food and water insecurity across parts of West Africa; reduced snow accumulation on the Tibetan Plateau threatened water supplies for billions downstream in Asia; Western Europe recorded one of its most intense compound heat-drought spells in over a century; the Amazon basin and the Pantanal wetlands in South America saw rivers fall to multi-decadal lows; and reduced snowpack fuelled extensive wildfire activity across western North America.
El Nino threatens to compound this further. It was already intensifying when UNCCD COP17 opened and has kept strengthening since. The World Meteorological Organization said on September 3 that it is now almost certain to persist through February 2027 and is forecast to reach “very strong” intensity before peaking towards the end of this year.
But having a national drought plan does not necessarily mean a country is prepared. When UNCCD works with countries, officials often point to existing national plans that largely spell out what should be done once drought has already struck. What is missing is planning across the full drought cycle — before, during and after an event.
“They treated drought as a crisis. For a crisis you don’t prepare, you just wait until it hits hard and then you do something,” he said. “But drought is now a constant risk.”
Tsegai and UNCCD Deputy Executive Secretary Andrea Meza Murillo spoke to a select group of journalists on the sidelines of COP17, held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, from August 17-28.
Meza traced that reactive habit to a deeper, structural problem: Governments themselves remain organised in silos, even as drought increasingly cuts across sectors and economies.
“We are very fragmented in the way we are analysing our problems,” she said, arguing that this fragmentation has also shaped the institutions created to respond to them.
“We have developed all these institutional arrangements, that are silos,” she said, adding that experts don’t see the trajectory of degradation reducing if this approach continues.
Greater coherence would also mean widening the circle of institutions responsible for drought. Agriculture, meteorology and environment departments have traditionally been the “usual suspects”, Tsegai said, but drought can no longer be managed by these sectors alone.
He pointed out that if countries are talking about drought and not involving the finance and health ministries, they are missing something. “We need a comprehensive whole-of-government approach to drought, whole-of-society approach to drought.”
One of the striking findings in the Nature Reviews Earth & Environment analysis was that droughts no longer are driven primarily by a shortfall in rainfall. Rising land temperatures are pushing up evaporative demand — how much moisture the atmosphere pulls from soil and vegetation — meaning regions can tip into drought even without an unusual rainfall deficit.
That changing risk also exposes the limits of early warning systems built largely around the question of when and where rain will fail. Much of the reactive approach, Tsegai said, begins with the assumption that early warning is simply about forecasting rainfall or predicting when the next dry spell will hit.
What matters, he said, is not only how much rain falls but how much moisture the soil can hold and for how long. Improving soil health, restoring degraded land and retaining more water in the landscape can all help determine how resilient an area is when dry conditions set in.
Only once a country has mapped that, he argued, can it choose mitigation measures suited to its own conditions.
“When we talk about drought, let’s not look up to the sky and if there would be a rainfall. Let’s look down on the land,” he said.
Looking down, however, is only one part of preparedness. Tsegai said early warning itself needs to go beyond predicting when a drought will occur.
“It is more than that. It is analysing the risk. It is analysing the vulnerability, who is going to be affected and what,” he said.
That assessment then has to shape what countries do before drought strikes. The response cannot be one-size-fits-all: the measures needed depend on the particular risks and vulnerabilities of a place. That is also why the period between droughts matters. National plans, he argued, need to cover the entire cycle -- what countries do before, during and after drought -- rather than switching into action only once an emergency has been declared.
“We should not wait until a drought strike to tell us if I was resilient or not,” he said. “This is too late.”
National preparedness, however, can only go so far for a risk whose consequences do not remain within national borders.
Countries broadly agree on the need to move from crisis response to drought resilience, officials said.
But where they have struggled to agree is on the international architecture needed to support that shift. COP17 ended without consensus on a global drought framework, continuing a debate over whether cooperation should ultimately take the form of a framework, protocol or another international instrument.
Meza was candid that the outcome reflects a harder geopolitical moment. “Nothing in multilateralism will be the perfect agreement,” she said, adding that the current environment is making ambitious negotiated outcomes increasingly difficult to reach.
For Tsegai and Meza, drought’s growing reach has left no country able to claim it is unaffected and the exact form the eventual response takes is ultimately a decision for governments. “This is a global challenge and it needs a global solution,” he said.
Both officials also pointed to the two UN summits that follow: The climate COP31 in Turkey and the biodiversity COP17 in Armenia. Land, water, climate and biodiversity are managed under three separate conventions that, Meza said, are “sometimes not really articulated” with each other.
For now, the gap between recognising drought as a global emergency and agreeing on a global response to it remains and will be carried forward to the next round of talks.