India, April 22 -- 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 ind...