Climate change would increase the frequency of extreme weather events threatening sustainable agricultural production as a warmed atmosphere has significant effects on functions of soil-crop systems. Although moderate drought is known to improve plant water use efficiency (WUE), how warming combined with drought affects terrestrial ecosystems remains largely unknown. Evolutionally, different plants have developed different strategies to facilitate water acquisition, and their physiological and morphological traits respond to drought in different ways. In this paper, we reviewed the combined effects of warming and drought on water and carbon dynamics in cropped lands in three aspects: global climate change and its underlying drivers; effects of warming, drought and other climate change factors on water/carbon dynamics; unknown/known problems and future research directions. Global warming induced by the increased population, carbon emissions from fossil fuel and increase in drought frequency will all pose a significant impact on water and carbon in farmland. Warming will change the amount of biomass thereby affecting crop growth and water use efficiency, in addition to the accelerated soil organic carbon (SOC) loss. In the above-ground, drought will reduce photosynthetic rate and transpiration, while in the below-ground, it will reduce microbial activity and slow down SOC decomposition, thereby inhibiting soil CO2 emissions. Climate change is likely to change the precipitation pattern, which in turn will alter soil respiration. Apparently, there is a lack of studies on water and carbon cycles under combined influence of drought and increasing temperature. This should be strengthened as water and carbon cycles in soil-crop systems are likely to be affected by multiple biotic and abiotic factors including soil water, temperature, carbon and nutrient concentration, in order to provide a mechanistic understanding of their combined effects on functions of farmland ecosystems as well as their feedback interaction with global warming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]