Socioeconomic exposure to drought under climate warming and globalization: The importance of vegetation‐CO<subscript>2</subscript> feedback.

Climate change has intensified drought severity, duration, frequency, and the spatial extent, promoting considerable concern about the socioeconomic exposure to drought. Some previous studies have suggested the overestimation of drought indices and more drying due to neglecting the impact of vegetation response to CO2. Using models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 and the socioeconomic projections, we quantified the impact of vegetation‐CO2 feedback on extreme drought frequency and the corresponding exposure of population and GDP under SSP126, SSP245, SSP370, and SSP585 scenarios. Results show that extreme drought frequency will increase significantly, affecting over 70% of global land by the 2050s. Along with rapid growth of socioeconomic factors, population and GDP exposure will increase by 26.90%–36.12% and 2.51–2.95 folds in the 2030s and 67.78%–78.72% and 3.41–5.94 folds in the 2050s. Underdeveloped countries are projected to face the most significant challenges, with substantial increases in population and GDP exposure to extreme drought. By incorporating the impact of vegetation‐CO2 feedback, we address biases of around 2% in extreme drought frequency, particularly in arid and semi‐arid regions, showing underestimations of more drying across around half of global land in the baseline period and the 2030s. The biases, however, shift to be overestimations globally in the 2050s. As a result, early underestimations of extreme drought frequency will lead to significant underestimations in exposed population and GDP by 5.25% and 6.07% in the baseline period, as well as in the 2030s. In contrast, later overestimations will lead to overestimations of exposed population by 3.16%–8.54% and exposed GDP by 2.82%–6.65% in the 2050s. This study provides a more accurate estimation of socioeconomic exposure to extreme drought and highlights the potential risks associated with global warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]