Nature retracts study claiming worsening global drought

A 2025 study published in the journal Nature, which claimed that climate change was significantly worsening global drought severity, has been retracted due to heavy methodological flaws. The original research by Gebrechorkos et al. asserted that drought severity had increased since 1981 and that atmospheric evaporative demand had worsened droughts by 40% between 2018 and 2022.

According to reports from ScienceFiles, the study contained gross errors, including miscoded data, misaligned comparison periods, and flawed weightings. A follow-up study by Xu et al., published in Communications Earth & Environment, challenged the original findings. The discrepancy centered on the calculation of Potential Evapotranspiration (PET); while the retracted paper overstated soil dryness by assuming uniform moisture dynamics, the re-calculation showed drought severity was less than one-sixth of the original report and found no detectable recent acceleration in global drought.