The paper assesses local people’s perceptions on the impact of drought on wetland ecosystem services and the associated household livelihood benefits, focusing on the Driefontein Ramsar site in Chirumanzu district, Zimbabwe. Field data were obtained using a questionnaire from 159 randomly selected households, key informant interviews and transect walks. The study findings show that provisioning, regulating and supporting services are severely affected by a high frequency of drought, occurring at least once every two years, compared to cultural services. There is a reduction in water for domestic use and crop farming, pasture for livestock, fish, thatch grass and ground water recharge. Although cultural services such as traditional rain-making ceremonies and spiritual enhancement are largely unaffected by drought, the wetland’s aesthetic value was reported to be diminishing. The habitat and breeding areas of endangered crane bird species were perceived to be dwindling, affecting their reproduction. All the household heads are not formally employed and largely depend on the wetland resources for food and income. However, drought is adversely affecting wetland-based agricultural activities that are key pillars of the households’ economy. Therefore, there is a need for alternative livelihood strategies that enable local communities to adapt to drought impacts without exerting more pressure on the declining wetland resources.

The paper assesses trends in use of earth observation data in wetland conditions monitoring and assessment in Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2019. Reviewed literature shows academia and research institutions (69.8%), government agencies (14%) and international development partners (16.3%) as the main users of remotely sensed data in wetland ecological assessments and monitoring. There is more reliance by the abovementioned stakeholders on freely available low‐cost resolution imagery from Landsat (62.9%) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (14.3%). Other stakeholders, however, are reliant on high‐resolution imagery like Rapid Eye (5.7%) and aerial photography (11.4%). Satellite images in wetland management in Zimbabwe are used for land use land cover change detection (42.1%), vegetation health monitoring (21.1%), water quantity monitoring (5.3%), water quality monitoring (13.2%) and wetland mapping (18.4%). The identified challenges faced by different stakeholders to effectively utilise EO data include high cost of high‐resolution imageries, limited expertise, inadequate equipment and software. Since the cost of high‐resolution satellite imagery mainly constraints the acquisition of suitable satellite data to assess the small wetlands that dominate Zimbabwe's landscape, there is need to promote use of recently launched freely available high‐resolution Sentinel data to improve the ecological assessment of wetland conditions.