Increasingly common since 1980, persistent multi-year droughts will continue to advance with the warming climate. There was a worrying increase in multi-year droughts between 1980 and 2018. Each year they became longer, more frequent, and more extreme, covering more land–an additional fifty thousand square kilometers on average—roughly the area of Vermont and New Hampshire combined. The droughts caused enormous damage to ecosystems, agriculture, and energy production. Currently, mitigation strategies largely consider droughts as yearly or seasonal events in stark contrast to the longer and more severe megadroughts we’ll face in the future.
st.ac.at/en/news/the-megadroughts-are-upon-us/