Terrestrial Poor Ecohealth Areas Continue to Expand Across Asian Drylands

Abstract

The 7th Rio declaration principle emphasizes global collaboration to protect and restore ecosystem health. While dryland ecosystem health (EH) remains critical to global sustainability agendas, its long‐term regional dynamics remain poorly constrained across the Asian drylands (AD), where land management decisions increasingly shape ecological outcomes. Here, we develop an integrated regional framework that combines vegetation dynamics, soil moisture, land use, and landscape spatial configuration to assess EH trajectories across AD from 2000 to 2020. We found that EH declined across AD until 2012 and partially recovered after 2013. Specifically, areas with poor EH increased by 2.1% (58 Mha), while healthy ecosystems declined by 0.08% and accounted for only 2% (7.9 Mha) of AD by 2020. These regional trends concealed pronounced spatial contrasts, with continued degradation across much of Central Asia and improvement in parts of Dryland East Asia. These divergent trends reflect interacting human land‐use and climate pressures. Land‐use change affected nearly 4.9% (42.87 Mha) of AD, largely driven by increasing pressure on rangelands and cropland expansion, and reductions in inland water and urbanization. Climatic conditions further contributed to these drivers, as post‐2013 warming coincided with increased soil moisture stress in Central Asia, while higher precipitation supported ecohealth recovery in East Asia drylands. These findings show that recent improvements in AD remain limited in extent and unevenly distributed, emphasizing that without region‐specific strategies integrating sustainable water resources management, rangeland stewardship, and climate adaptation, poor ecosystem health is likely to continue expanding across large portions of the Asian drylands.