Climate change-driven increases in drought frequency and severity could compromise drylands ecosystems and their important contribution to the terrestrial carbon sink. Dryland’s resilience is crucial for its capacity to withstand and recover from those natural perturbations. Hot drought becomes new ‘normal’ under warming world. Therefore, predicting dryland resilience is urgent. We used multiple satellite datasets (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index - NDVI, and contiguous sun-induced fluorescence, CSIF) and tree ring data to evaluate dryland resistance and resilience under normal droughts and hot droughts. This work points to a decline in the capacity of drylands to withstand hot droughts that should be accounted for in future estimates of terrestrial carbon sink strength and the design of land-based mitigation and adaptation plans.

Hot droughts generally had a more significant deleterious effect on drylands than normal droughts. The probability that they would fail to recover to their pre-drought condition (non-resilient) of drylands was almost double after hot droughts (11.4%) compared to that during normal droughts (6.2%).

Over the past three decades, on average, drylands have experienced a significant decline in resistance and resilience to normal and especially for hot droughts over the last three decades.

Drought resistance is affected by both water supply and high temperature, but drought resilience is only affected by high temperature.

Using a CMIP6 model ensemble, we project a further weakening of dryland resilience with more than 14% of drylands likely to experience degradation due to more frequent hot drought events by 2100.