Climate change-driven increases in the frequency of severe drought directly impacts the biodiversity and ecological functioning of tropical ecosystem, where the structure and composition of biological communities and their dynamics are strongly modulated by water availability. In this context, biodiversity and ecological functioning are intricately linked, and their relationship is a determining factor in maintaining critical ecosystem services such as regulating water and carbon cycles. Plant survival and growth responses to severe drought will vary depending on individual species’ functional traits and adaptative strategies, which in turn will impact water and carbon fluxes in tropical forests. Our ability to understand these complex drought-tropical vegetation interactions is greatly limited due to the challenges of designing studies that rely on naturally occurring droughts, given their unpredictability and requirements of long-term monitoring. However, an increasing number of throughfall manipulation experiments designed to simulate the effects of reduced soil moisture availability on tropical ecosystem functioning in recent decades are providing novel and impactful insights on how future droughts may alter biodiversity and carbon-water cycling in tropical ecosystems. This symposium will explore recent advances in the knowledge of how different tropical plant communities respond to experimentally induced severe drought, focusing on how drought affects plant species diversity and the underlying plant physiological mechanisms and processes that regulate water and carbon cycling functions. We also consider the implications of lessons learned from tropical ecosystem drought experiments for understanding and predicting their resilience and recovery capacity under future climate change.