aDougna Woessa was a young boy when drought first tore his country apart. When crops failed in Ethiopia’s rain-starved regions in the early 1970s, and his school turned classrooms into granaries for farmers to send aid, he never imagined that scientists would begin to link the forces that depleted fields to the cyclical changes in trade winds that have long accelerated violent weather from South America to Australia.
Now infamous El Niño – means “little boy” in Spanish – Although it was named by Pacific fishermen in the 1800s, it wasn’t until the 1970s that scientists began to understand its global nature and piece together the historical effects of natural weather patterns characterized by hot years and harsh extremes.
The 1972-1973 El Niño warmed Peru’s waters to levels that destroyed the world’s largest anchovy fishery, prompting scientists to make their first predictions about the situation the following year. It also brought severe drought to parts of South Asia, the Sahel, and East Africa, preceding the oil crisis that deepened global hunger. In Ethiopia, protests against the emperor’s handling of the famine aided a military coup that led to the creation of a communist dictatorship.
Two hammerhead sharks captured in Lima in 1997. Warm-water fish were drawn to Peruvian waters heated by El Niño. Photo: Ricardo Choi Ki-Fox/AP
“El Niño is one of the most difficult climate phenomena,” Woessa said. He grew up to become an epidemiologist at the Ethiopian Institute of Public Health, where he has studied the effects of El Niño on the malaria epidemic. “Nutrition is all about the ability to withstand the challenges of adverse effects on human health.”
But too often El Niño deprives nutrition of those who need it most. A decade later, in 1982-1983, Woessa was in high school when a stronger El Niño occurred. As a result, some of his classmates were forced to travel 150 kilometers to help with the harvest at a state farm. By his first year of college, further crop failures and civil war had escalated the widespread hunger into an even more devastating famine, which gained worldwide attention through the Live Aid concert. Woessa and her fellow students took turns helping people at a shelter near the university. “There were two pieces of bread in the morning, so we were supposed to share breakfast.”
In 2022, a girl collects water from the Shabelle River in Gode, Ethiopia, when 20 million people go hungry due to drought. Photography: Eduardo Sotelas/AFP/Getty Images
Scientists are quick to warn that climate change is just one of many factors that will cause societies to collapse, but at the extreme end of the spectrum, El Niño could cause apocalyptic suffering. During the worst El Niño years of the 19th century, tens of millions of people died from famine in India, China, and Brazil. There is some evidence to suggest that in the 18th century, erratic weather ruined the harvest and set the stage for the French Revolution. It also helped the Spaniards conquer the Incas in the 16th century by bringing rain and nourishing the desert plants that supported their marches. A loose theory suggests that it brought ancient civilizations from Egypt to China.
This year, El Nino will occur again. Scientists are concerned that El Niño may resemble a young man more than a boy. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said an El Niño event formed in the Pacific Ocean last week, and there is a 63% chance it will be “very strong” by its peak near the end of the year. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology followed suit on Tuesday, warning that the heat wave and bushfires that hit the country every year would get worse.
Some scientists are informally calling this a “super” or “Godzilla” El Niño based on the size of the expected temperature anomaly, which will further increase global heat as extreme weather events such as the recent European heatwave and numerous storms push the limits of what society can cope with. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) used more cautious language when it warned earlier this month to prepare for its return, arguing that it was too early to assess its strength because of wide variation in model results.
Spectators at the 2026 French Open in Paris cool off at water cannon stations during a heatwave. Photo: Benoît Tessier/Reuters
But even if it falls short of catastrophic predictions, its impact will arrive in unprecedented circumstances that will further complicate matters. Scientists say that while next year is almost certain to be the hottest year on record, a variety of economic factors are putting vulnerable countries at greater risk. “It’s not just El Niño that I’m worried about,” says Sonali McDiarmid, a climate scientist at New York University who echoes the WMO’s warnings about El Niño’s intensity. “I’m worried about multiple stressors occurring at the same time.”
Roughly half of the world’s 68 poorest countries are in or at high risk of debt crisis, the International Monetary Fund warned in March, with soaring energy prices and limited fertilizer supplies weakening their buffers against climate shocks since the Iran war. The Famine Early Warning System Network predicted this month that 115 million to 125 million people in Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia are at risk of famine and will need emergency food aid by December. Cutting US foreign aid and shrinking European development budgets mean less support may be available in the event of a crisis.
On Thursday, in response to the threat posed by El Niño, the United Nations World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization announced their first joint appeal for funding to avert a crisis before it happens. Citing research showing that every dollar spent on “anticipatory action” saves $7 in humanitarian relief costs, agencies said they were $167 million short of the $202 million needed to support 8.8 million people with drought-resistant seeds, flood protection, water storage systems and cash transfers.
Women from the Murle tribe line up at a World Food Program distribution center in Gumuruk, South Sudan, in 2021, where armed conflict has exacerbated food shortages. Photographer: Simon Wolfert/AFP/Getty Images
The good news is that El Niño is not expected to have a negative impact on agricultural crops worldwide. Gains in some regions typically offset losses in others, but the losers include those least able to cope. Anne Jerema, executive director of climate campaign group 350.org, said many of the most affected countries in Africa and Asia were also hit hard by the fertilizer crisis, with some of the most dependent on food imports and some of the highest debt stress. “This means that El Niño will eliminate the last lifeline in the country for people who are unable to access markets, access humanitarian aid, and move freely.”
Shockwaves will be felt even in the rich world, as El Niño brings stronger heat waves and widespread spread of vector-borne diseases. Its arrival has led to a “persistent” slowdown in improving mortality rates even in wealthy countries such as the United States, Australia, Japan and South Korea, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in January.
Rice will be planted in Srinagar, Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, in 2026 amid concerns that the Iranian war will raise fertilizer, fuel and transportation costs. Photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images
The damage caused by El Niño has been checked by a measure of predictability in recent decades, but it offers a glimpse of the cascading terror that climate scientists warn will destabilize society as the planet warms.
El Niño-related shocks, compounded by geopolitical tensions, high energy and fertilizer prices, and weak supply chains, could be “increasing the likelihood of complex and non-linear systemic effects,” a European Commission Joint Research Center study warned on Monday, with knock-on effects across all economic sectors linked to the natural world.
“Possible transmission routes would range from droughts, floods, and heat stress that affect agricultural production, labor productivity, water availability, hydropower and transportation systems, to high food and energy prices, inflationary pressures, fiscal stress, and reduced repayment capacity of borrowers,” the authors write.
Can we avoid such a disaster next year? WMO said El Niño does not necessarily have to be a “recipe for disaster” and its predictions are a call to action before danger escalates into crisis. Secretary-General Celeste Sauro called on the world to step up efforts to build multi-hazard early warning systems, as only 128 countries report having such systems in place.
Meanwhile, climate change activists are calling for Global South debt cancellation and for funding social protection through a windfall tax on oil and gas companies’ excess profits, rather than funding fossil fuels. “There is a lot of research showing that targeted social protection is much more effective than fossil fuel and fertilizer subsidies because it reaches those who need it most,” Jerema said.
In March of this year, people in Kolkata, India, were waiting to purchase liquefied petroleum gas as gas supply disruptions and gas import restrictions continued due to conflicts in the Middle East. Photo: Debajyoti Chakraborty/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
António Guterres, who ends his term as UN Secretary-General at the end of this year, has been making similar desperate calls for years to world leaders to end their dependence on fossil fuels that have caused the planet to overheat and degrade the natural world. The world has warmed by about 1.3 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, and temperatures are rising so quickly that the worst El Niño years in recent years, such as 1997-1998, are much less hot than they are now, when we’ve moved into a cooler La Niña.
For Woessa, rising temperatures and deforestation have disrupted rainfall patterns even around the village where he grew up. The rivers he swam in as a boy have turned into small streams, and the rainfall that previous generations relied on to plant crops has become erratic. He added that when calling his late father, asking about the rain was a typical way to start the conversation.
“The biggest concern is the transition of the rainy season,” he said. “The way it develops is completely different compared to when I was a child.”
