With all the adverse effects we’ve already seen from this event, it’s highly likely to intensify further toward the end of this year and into the next. But we had warning: the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) flagged back in May that the available information was enough to trigger prevention and response plans ahead of a likely El Niño event.
A new El Niño is underway, and there are signs it could get stronger. According to a report published in Nature, some forecasts suggest it could become the most powerful in the last 150 years. While its peak is still ahead, extreme weather impacts are already spiking: record rainfall, drought, and unprecedented heat waves, among others.
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and is associated with warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It can disrupt weather patterns across much of the planet, driving drier- or wetter-than-normal conditions depending on the region, leading to droughts in some areas and extreme rainfall events in others.
The cost of failing to activate prevention and response plans is plain to see. In 2023, an El Niño-related drought created a bottleneck at the Panama Canal that added up to six additional days of transit for ships crossing the waterway, according to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The UN World Food Programme projected that the new El Niño episode could push an additional 49 million people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027, bringing the total to 274 million in the most vulnerable regions — with Latin America and the Caribbean among the areas projected to see the steepest increases, with more than 16 million people affected.
One of the most impactful El Niño events on record, the 1997–98 episode, cost the global economy $5.7 trillion, according to an estimate published in Science.
El Niño and Climate Change
El Niño is a natural phenomenon, but recent research shows that climate change could increase its frequency and intensity. While we’ve seen the effects of El Niño before, climate change could drive increasingly larger and more severe events.
Each El Niño episode is different from the last. But because it’s continuously monitored, we have a window of months to prepare in advance. Managing this El Niño well isn’t an isolated damage-control exercise, but a test of our readiness for extreme events. And therein lies the opportunity: this is a climate phenomenon we can see coming months ahead of time, one that can be addressed proactively rather than reacted to after the fact. It’s a phenomenon that invites and demands that we learn the lessons this year is teaching us and adapt to a changing climate.
More and more organizations are asking us how to factor this kind of information into their decision-making. Seasonal climate events have near-term impacts on organizations, and responding nimbly is becoming an increasingly pressing need. Even amid uncertainty, getting ahead of the risk and making the most of the window that projections give us is an opportunity to build a more resilient, better-prepared society and economy.
