Global Agricultural Drought Crisis: Synergistic Impacts of Climate Change and Human Activities and Their Feedback Mechanisms

Global agricultural drought is evolving into a compound crisis threatening food security and ecological stability that is characterized by increased frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent. Since 2000, the global number of drought events has increased by 29% compared with the previous two decades, and 82% of drought-related losses in developing countries are concentrated in agriculture. The UNCCD (2022) projects that drought may affect up to three quarters of the world’s population by 2050. Climate change and human activities jointly drive this escalation through higher atmospheric evaporative demand, altered precipitation regimes, land use change, groundwater overexploitation, and pollution emissions. Their interaction forms amplifying feedback loops across ecology-agriculture and climate–agriculture systems, resulting in ecosystem degradation, crop yield loss, and rising socioeconomic inequality. Addressing this crisis requires a three-dimensional framework integrating mitigation, adaptation, and collaborative governance. This review synthesizes coupled driving mechanisms, cross-system impacts, and response pathways, and it also highlights priorities in compound-drought attribution, region-specific technology scaling, cross-scale governance, and resilience building in vulnerable regions.