A climate changed world is too hot, too wet, too on fire — and increasingly, too dry. Though rainfall events are getting stronger, that doesn’t mean the water always falls where it needs to, and a new study shows that megadroughts — persistent, multi-year or at times even multi-decade, drought events — are claiming more and more of the planet’s land area.

The study, published on Thursday in Science, found that MYDs, or multi-year droughts, have increased in total size by 49,279 square kilometers every year between 1980 and 2018. That’s an entire Slovakia’s worth, or an entire Dominican Republic, or almost a Costa Rica, added to the megadrought tally, every single year.

There are differences in how various biomes respond to a megadrought, with obvious implications for things like agriculture. The researchers found that temperate grasslands see the biggest drops in greenness of vegetation during an MYD event; forests, both boreal and tropical, seemed to fare better. Overall, though, the megadroughts are getting “drier, hotter, and [leading] to increasingly diminished vegetation greenness.”

Among the most prominent megadroughts in recent years is in the American southwest, lasting for basically this entire century so far, though 2022 and 2023 offered some reprieve. Government research has found that events like that, “amplified by climate change… will significantly strain water resources and present major resiliency challenges in the future.”

There was a point earlier this decade when two of the country’s most important reservoirs Lake Mead and Lake Powell, were dropping so far that a “deadpool,” where water would simply stop flowing over the hydroelectric dams that created those lakes, was a real concern. Right now in Zambia, a year-long drought is doing just that, causing widespread power outages. The American reservoirs have since been refilled somewhat, but with that much area joining the megadroughts of the world every year there are bound to be such events in the future.