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.

Global warming is reshaping terrestrial water cycling and near-surface climate risks through atmospheric moistening, enhanced precipitation variability, rising evaporative demand, and more frequent compound extremes. This narrative review synthesizes recent advances in land–atmosphere interactions and atmospheric water cycle feedbacks, and its distinctive contribution is to connect physical feedback chains with human land surface perturbations, compound risk, and observation model machine learning evidence. We reviewed the literature from Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, publisher databases, and Crossref metadata, prioritizing peer-reviewed studies published mainly during 2010–2026 while retaining foundational work on soil moisture feedbacks, moisture recycling, irrigation, aerosols, and boundary-layer processes. The synthesis emphasizes where evidence is robust, where feedback signs are regime dependent, and where uncertainty still propagates from evapotranspiration partitioning, boundary-layer diagnosis, aerosol–cloud interactions, human water management, and nonstationary climate conditions. The review concludes that the same land surface perturbation may cool locally, increase humid heat exposure, alter downwind precipitation, or intensify water depletion, depending on the climate regime, season, scale, and management. Future research should therefore move beyond single-variable correlation analyses toward causal, cross-scale, and risk-oriented attribution frameworks that integrate multi-source observations, process models, moisture tracking, and physically constrained machine learning.