Journal article
Warming accelerates global drought severity
- Abstract:
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Drought is one of the most common and complex natural hazards affecting the environment, economies and populations globally1,2,3,4. However, there are significant uncertainties in global drought trends4,5,6, and a limited understanding of the extent to which a key driver, atmospheric evaporative demand (AED), impacts the recent evolution of the magnitude, frequency, duration and areal extent of droughts. Here, by developing an ensemble of high-resolution global drought datasets for 1901–2022, we find an increasing trend in drought severity worldwide. Our findings suggest that AED has increased drought severity by an average of 40% globally. Not only are typically dry regions becoming drier but also wet areas are experiencing drying trends. During the past 5 years (2018–2022), the areas in drought have expanded by 74% on average compared with 1981–2017, with AED contributing to 58% of this increase. The year 2022 was record-breaking, with 30% of the global land area affected by moderate and extreme droughts, 42% of which was attributed to increased AED. Our findings indicate that AED has an increasingly important role in driving severe droughts and that this tendency will likely continue under future warming scenarios.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 36.8MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41586-025-09047-2
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature More from this journal
- Volume:
- 642
- Issue:
- 8068
- Pages:
- 628-635
- Publication date:
- 2025-06-04
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-04-18
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1476-4687
- ISSN:
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0028-0836
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2128246
- Local pid:
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pubs:2128246
- Deposit date:
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2025-06-05
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Gebrechorkos et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2025, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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