How many droughts in 2026?
As of 2 November 2026, Global Incident Tracker has recorded 2,973 droughts in 2026 (records begin on 9 August 2026), 6 of them rated severe or extreme; the most were in India (191).
Droughts come from official and scientific feeds (GDACS, NASA EONET, ReliefWeb, news), so large events are well covered; small ones are recorded far more completely in countries with dense monitoring.
2026Month by month
| Month | Recorded | Severe or extreme | |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 0 | 0 | before records began |
| February | 2 | 1 | before records began |
| March | 0 | 0 | before records began |
| April | 4 | 0 | before records began |
| May | 1 | 0 | before records began |
| June | 2 | 0 | before records began |
| July | 6 | 3 | before records began |
| August | 70 | 2 | |
| September | 1,089 | 0 | |
| October | 1,732 | 0 | |
| November | 67 so far | 0 | |
| December | — | — | |
| Total | 2,973 | 6 |
Severity, then number of reportsThe 10 most severe droughts of 2026
Ranked by this site's severity signal, then by how many separate reports reached us. Neither is a death toll.
2026Countries with the most droughts
| # | Country | Recorded | Severe or extreme |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | India | 191 | 0 |
| 2 | United States | 153 | 0 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 51 | 0 |
| 4 | Philippines | 29 | 0 |
| 5 | Kenya | 22 | 0 |
| 6 | China | 21 | 0 |
| 7 | Panama | 21 | 0 |
| 8 | South Africa | 20 | 0 |
| 9 | Spain | 19 | 0 |
| 10 | Italy | 17 | 0 |
| 11 | Sudan | 17 | 0 |
| 12 | Indonesia | 17 | 0 |
| 13 | France | 16 | 0 |
| 14 | Hungary | 13 | 0 |
| 15 | Ethiopia | 12 | 1 |
Recorded in 103 countries. Events at sea or without a location are not in this table.
QuestionsAbout this count
How many droughts have there been in 2026?
Which country has had the most droughts in 2026?
Which month of 2026 had the most droughts?
Is this the official number of droughts?
How to cite this
Suggested citation:
Global Incident Tracker (2026). Droughts recorded in 2026. Data as of 2 November 2026. https://globalincidenttracker.com/2026/droughts (CC BY 4.0)
Quote it as: “As of 2 November 2026, Global Incident Tracker has recorded 2,973 droughts in 2026 (records begin on 9 August 2026), 6 of them rated severe or extreme; the most were in India (191).” — link the words Global Incident Tracker to https://globalincidenttracker.com/2026/droughts.
Data & methodology
- Licence: CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse, including commercially, with credit and a link. Upstream sources keep their own terms (listed here).
- What is counted: records of events by the date they happened (UTC), after duplicate reports were merged. Official warnings are counted separately, never as events. How records are sourced and checked.
- What is missing: types with no official feed exist here only because news reported them, so their counts are a floor, not a total. Coverage by type.
- Not a death toll: severity is this site’s monitoring signal, not an official damage or casualty assessment.
- Download: this page as CSV · every record as CSV or JSON.
Counts compiled by Global Incident Tracker and published under CC BY 4.0. Upstream records keep their own terms: USGS, NOAA and NASA data are US public domain; GDACS is free to reuse with attribution; headlines belong to their publishers. Every record of this type, warnings included: full CSV.