Abstract: In recent years, uncommonly severe droughts have attacked many places in Guangdong Province, with long duration, wide impact and serious consequences, which is contrary to people’s general understanding of the water-rich areas in the south. In order to find out the causes, influencing factors and characteristics of drought in Guangdong Province, and effectively identify the weaknesses in drought disaster prevention and control, taking the typical drought-prone counties in Guangdong Province-Chaonan District in eastern Guangdong and Xuwen County in western Guangdong Province as examples, based on the natural disaster risk theory, this paper establishes a drought disaster risk assessment zoning model, which couples the three elements of hazard, vulnerability and defense, and the evaluation index system and calculation method of comprehensive risk index are put forward. The index weight is determined by analytic hierarchy process. The natural breakpoint method is used to scientifically divide the regionalization, and the risk matrix method is introduced to aggregate the drought risk and drought defense and disaster reduction ability to represent the level of drought disaster prevention and control, and the risk influencing factors and risk levels of drought disaster are qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated. The results show that, under the main influence of less natural rainfall and large demand for economic and social water, the comprehensive risk of drought disaster in Chaonan increase from west to east, most towns and streets have moderate drought risks, while the whole area of Xuwen has medium-high and above drought risks, the comprehensive risk of drought disaster in western and central areas is high. If the water supply engineering capacity, river system density and drought-defense investment level are not high, it can be determined that most towns and streets in Chaonan are medium prevention areas, and most towns and villages in Xuwen are key prevention areas. The rationality of the results is verified by typical historical drought events, and some measures and suggestions are put forward for the weaknesses of drought defense in drought-prone counties. The research results can provide technical support for improving the drought-defense and disaster reduction system in typical drought-prone counties in Guangdong Province.