Drought has always been part of the mandate of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. But COP17 in Mongolia demonstrated an evolved understanding: drought is increasingly seen as a systemic risk rather than simply an issue of land degradation, bringing policy closer to the evolution of scientific understanding on drought resilience.
Drought itself is not a problem to be solved. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon to which ecosystems and communities in arid and semi-arid regions have adapted for centuries.
Two factors are increasingly turning drought into crisis. First, climate change is altering rainfall patterns and ecosystems, increasing drought severity and frequency. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, 24 countries across five continents declared drought emergencies. Second, the global food system amplifies drought impacts. Droughts in major food-producing regions drive food prices, increase competition over resources and contribute to displacement and instability. Through trade and supply chains, impacts travel far beyond where drought occurs.
This broader understanding was evident at COP17. Some 1.84 billion people experienced drought conditions across five continents in 2022 and 2023. UNCCD’s recent work on the “Drought Nexus” connects drought with water scarcity, land degradation, food insecurity, energy, migration and conflict. COP17 similarly treated drought as an economic, food, water and security challenge rather than a narrow environmental one.
But COP17 also demonstrated how difficult governing such an interconnected risk remains. Parties again failed to resolve whether international drought governance requires a legally binding protocol, a non-binding global framework, or stronger implementation through existing arrangements. They did agree that drought will become a stand-alone agenda item at COP18 and every ordinary UNCCD COP thereafter.
There is an important lesson here. Drought is not new to water management. Irrigation has always been about delivering water at the right time and place for crop survival and food security. But while our understanding of drought is becoming increasingly integrated, its governance remains fragmented.
Dan Meyers/Unsplash
Drought belongs in UNCCD, but not only in UNCCD
Drought is not caused by failures of rainfall alone. Land condition shapes how landscapes respond when rainfall declines. Healthy soils, vegetation, wetlands and rangelands affect infiltration, soil moisture, erosion, water retention and the resilience of agricultural and pastoral systems. Degraded landscapes amplify climatic shocks.
This was particularly visible at COP17, where rangelands moved towards the centre of the global land agenda. Rangelands cover 54 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and support around two billion people. The new Rangelands Flagship Initiative brings together US$1.2 billion across 45 projects, recognising these as productive ecosystems central to food, water, biodiversity and resilience.
A meteorological drought may begin with reduced rainfall. Its consequences then propagate through the hydrological cycle: soil moisture, vegetation, groundwater recharge, aquifers, river flows, wetlands and reservoirs, and ultimately agriculture, energy, drinking water, ecosystems and economies. How severe those consequences become is fundamentally shaped by human decisions.
Nature-based Solutions therefore have an important role in protecting and restoring ecosystem functions that influence soil moisture, infiltration, groundwater recharge and freshwater resilience. But NbS must complement, rather than substitute for, effective water and land governance.
Drought is neither simply a climate phenomenon nor a land-management problem. It is a systemic risk transmitted through the hydrological cycle and amplified or moderated by how we govern land, water, people and economies. In the decade to 2017, drought affected at least 1.5 billion people and cost an estimated US$125 billion globally, while recorded drought events have increased by 29 per cent over the past twenty years.
Land provides an essential platform for drought resilience; the hydrological cycle provides the pathway through which many drought impacts propagate.
The difficult question is not land or water. It is people.
Y K/Unsplash
Reducing drought risk management to managing land or water depoliticises what are often failures of entitlement and access.
We are becoming much better at detecting drought, yet impacts on lives and livelihoods continue to increase. This raises a fundamental question: are our drought early-warning systems measuring the right things?
Earth observation, forecasting and hydrological monitoring allow governments to identify emerging risks earlier. COP17 reinforced this direction through initiatives including the International Drought Resilience Observatory and a new Drought Resilience Index.
But information alone does not manage drought.
Drought institutions often fail to account for barriers, including gendered barriers, determining whether people can act on the information and support they receive. Responses designed around a single production-focused pathway can reinforce the inequalities that make households vulnerable in the first place.
Even the trigger for action can be contested. Research in East Africa has shown that whether a year is classified as a “drought year” or “normal year” can depend partly on the historical reference period used to calculate rainfall averages. Governance therefore begins with the indicators and thresholds determining whether, and when, a response starts.
Effective early warning must consequently reflect how drought affects different people and sectors. Relevant indicators might include rainfall and temperature in crop-producing areas; rainfall and vegetation condition in pastoral areas; food prices and availability where malnutrition is prevalent; and hydrological information for reservoirs and water systems. At global level, crop inputs, food prices and trade restrictions need to be understood alongside meteorological and hydrological indicators.
Crucially, information must also reach farmers, pastoralists and households in forms they can use, accompanied by the means to act at the right time.
Yet much global drought response still treats drought primarily as a food-security emergency. Zambia’s 2024 drought flash appeal illustrates the pattern: food security received around US$35 million compared with US$4 million for WASH. Including agriculture, food-related funding exceeded water funding by roughly ten to one. Only a marginal share of humanitarian drought funding supports longer-term resilience such as livelihood diversification or ecosystem restoration.
For decades, the international community has therefore largely responded to drought as a food-security crisis rather than as a warning that land and ecosystem degradation, unsustainable water management and entrenched poverty can no longer be left unaddressed.
The next generation of drought policy must move beyond predicting drought towards building resilience before crisis develops. It is not drought itself that needs to be eliminated. It is the vulnerability that turns drought into disaster: poverty, land degradation, unsustainable resource use and unequal access to resources and services.
This is also a global equity issue. Around 85 per cent of people affected by drought live in low- and middle-income countries. Drought resilience depends as much on sustainable livelihoods and quality basic services in normal years as on plans activated during drought years.
Avoid creating another silo
The answer cannot simply be another institutional silo around drought. A future global drought instrument, which IUCN has supported, should instead strengthen connections between drought, land, water, biodiversity, food systems and climate action.
The key question is what functions are required to manage systemic drought risk, and at what level should they be performed?
Some clearly belong within UNCCD. Others belong within national development and water policy, basin organisations, disaster-risk institutions, agricultural systems and transboundary agreements. The objective should not be institutional ownership of drought, but interoperability between the institutions needed to manage it.
Towards a stronger global water architecture
Saleh/Unsplash
This is where the wider global water governance debate becomes important. The opportunity is not simply to ensure water appears in other international processes, but to create mechanisms through which those processes connect around implementation.
This is also the rationale behind IUCN’s proposed Global Framework for Water Governance and Action. The world does not lack water-related institutions, agreements or commitments. What remains insufficient is an architecture capable of sustaining political attention, connecting implementation, aligning finance and strengthening accountability across sectors and governance levels.
For drought, such an architecture would connect international drought policy with agricultural and rural development policy, social protection, health, water governance, basin and aquifer institutions, ecosystem management, transboundary cooperation, early warning and finance.
Transboundary rivers and aquifers are particularly important because drought can intensify competition between countries precisely when cooperation is most necessary. IUCN has therefore called for transboundary water cooperation to form part of the emerging global drought regime.
Drought is a test not only of global water governance, but of governance itself. Where governance fails, drought can have devastating impacts. Where institutions, services and livelihoods are resilient, the same climatic shock can be absorbed with dramatically fewer consequences.
As the international community moves from Abu Dhabi in December 2026 to Dushanbe in June 2028 through the UN Water Conference process, towards UNCCD COP18 in Egypt, and ultimately towards a new sustainable development architecture beyond 2030, drought provides a powerful test for the future of global governance.
COP17 showed both the political difficulty and the practical urgency of making these connections. The task now is not to create another silo. It is to build the architecture that connects them.
More Information:
Authors:
Sofie Jaffe and James Dalton
