Chile’s Megadrought is a Wake-Up Call for Global Water Governance

Studies show Chile is experiencing its longest and most intense megadrought in a millennium. Droughts are categorized as natural disasters, which means that even without the input of humankind, they would still occur in nature. But record heat due to global warming gave birth to more robust incarnations of the drought crisis called megadroughts — which can last for a decade or longer. Over the past 15 years, Chile’s megadrought has devastated landscapes and ecosystems, in some cases transforming them in ways the country may never recover from. 

“The consequences of these megadroughts go beyond what’s visible — underground water supplies are running dry, agricultural systems are being pushed to the brink, and even industries like mining are at risk,” said glaciologist Francesca Pellicciotti, a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and an author of a new study on global megadroughts. “We tend to think of droughts in terms of agriculture or wildfires, but there are hidden impacts — like deep groundwater depletion — that don’t make headlines but have devastating consequences. Satellite data showed that some forests are not recovering after droughts. If the trees don’t bounce back, what happens to the ecosystems that depend on them?”

Pellicciotti and a team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research and the National University of Singapore set out to understand Chile’s megadrought, but their research soon stretched far further. 

“This project started in Chile when we saw the long-term drought unfolding in real-time. But as we looked deeper, we realized this was part of a much bigger pattern,” Pellicciotti said. The team expanded the parameters of their study to include 10,000 droughts across 40 years of climate data spanning every continent. This search unveiled that megadroughts are growing longer, happening more frequently and becoming more severe worldwide.

“The Chile megadrought wasn’t even ranked among the top 10 in our global classification, which shows just how severe other regions’ droughts have been,” Pellicciotti said. “What’s even more alarming is that the last three years — some of the hottest on record — weren’t included in our dataset. The reality may be even worse than what we’ve reported.”

For Chile, a country that relies on its glaciers to serve as reservoirs during times of low rainfall, it was easy to identify the intensification of these droughts. The glaciers had significantly shrunk in size, indicating a growth in the water deficit, even when considering seasonal droughts. For other regions, symptoms of this growing concern are even more evident, Pellicciotti said. “In some places, rivers are disappearing. The hydrological system is fundamentally changing, and it’s happening faster than we anticipated,” she explained.

Many of us depend on our leaders in the face of such threats, but unfortunately, most government policies were drafted with more predictable and less extreme drought trends in mind. “[They] were designed for short-term droughts, not decade-long dry spells,” Pellicciotti said. “We need to rethink water governance before we run out of options.”

An area of great concern when it comes to global water policy is conflict over use. In Chile, fights have broken out over who should have access or rights to water. This policy challenge must be tackled to move the mindset from competition to cooperation and achieve equity when it comes to water rights, according to the study. While some regions like Europe are implementing transnational water policies, others like Africa and Latin America do not yet have coordinated drought adaptation plans. 

With this study, Pellicciotti and the research team are advocating for a fundamental shift in water governance and policy. Reactive plans that wait until cities are in the thick of a megadrought to take action are no longer sufficient. An effective response requires fair water distribution policies, long-term and science-backed adaptation strategies, and greater cooperation between nations and across public and private sectors, according to the study. 

“We’ve already seen conflicts in Chile between farmers, mining companies, and local communities over dwindling water supplies. Without better management, these disputes will only grow more intense,” Pellicciotti said. “Megadroughts don’t respect national borders. Countries need to work together, share data and develop joint water management plans to mitigate the worst effects.”