Drylands are home to more than 38% of the world's population and are one of the most sensitive areas to climate change and human activities. This review describes recent progress in dryland climate change research. Recent findings indicate that the long‐term trend of the aridity index (AI) is mainly attributable to increased greenhouse gas emissions, while anthropogenic aerosols exert small effects but alter its attributions. Atmosphere‐land interactions determine the intensity of regional response. The largest warming during the last 100 years was observed over drylands and accounted for more than half of the continental warming. The global pattern and interdecadal variability of aridity changes are modulated by oceanic oscillations. The different phases of those oceanic oscillations induce significant changes in land‐sea and north‐south thermal contrasts, which affect the intensity of the westerlies and planetary waves and the blocking frequency, thereby altering global changes in temperature and precipitation. During 1948–2008, the drylands in the Americas became wetter due to enhanced westerlies, whereas the drylands in the Eastern Hemisphere became drier because of the weakened East Asian summer monsoon. Drylands as defined by the AI have expanded over the last 60 years and are projected to expand in the 21st century. The largest expansion of drylands has occurred in semiarid regions since the early 1960s. Dryland expansion will lead to reduced carbon sequestration and enhanced regional warming. The increasing aridity, enhanced warming, and rapidly growing population will exacerbate the risk of land degradation and desertification in the near future in developing countries.

The amount, frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation over Xinjiang have increased dramatically under the wetting trend in Northwest China, but long‐term trends in the precipitation‐recycling process remain largely unexplored. Based on dynamic recycling model and MERRA2 reanalysis, we revealed a mean recycling ratio for extreme precipitation in Xinjiang of 42.3% with a growth rate of 2.3% decade⁻¹ during 1982–2019. The increasing trend of extreme precipitation was almost equally attributed to increased recycling precipitation (49%) and external precipitation (51%). The extreme precipitation in Xinjiang exhibited two peak centers, the Tianshan Mountains region (TS) and Kunlun Mountains region (KL), highlighting variations in the water cycle. Specifically, the external cycle predominated the increased extreme precipitation in TS (61%), while the recycling process mainly influenced the increase in KL (67%) due to markedly enhanced evapotranspiration. Moisture source attribution further proved the crucial role of evapotranspiration from Xinjiang and its vicinity in extreme precipitation.