By Natalia Rubiano
‘’The world must treat [El Niño] as the urgent climate warning it is.’’ – Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General
El Niño, the naturally recurring climate pattern linked to warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, was officially declared on 11 June by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Its return had been widely anticipated. What is drawing global attention is how strong it could become. In its July update, NOAA raised the odds from 63 per cent in June to 81 per cent that El Niño will strengthen into a very strong event between October and December. If it does, it would rank among the strongest on record and would likely be described as a ‘super El Niño’.
El Niño is a natural part of the Earth’s climate system, returning every few years as sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific shift. In a warming world, however, its impacts can become more severe, increasing the risk of extreme heat, drought, flooding and wildfires that threaten the health and livelihoods of billions of people. Knowing the risks is only half the challenge. The other half is ensuring countries have the resources, particularly climate finance, to act on that knowledge.
What a ‘super El Niño’ actually is
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a natural cycle in the equatorial Pacific that turns over every two to seven years and usually lasts between nine and twelve months. They often begin developing between March and June, reach peak intensity between November and February, and exert their strongest influence on global temperatures in the year following their onset.
The term ‘super El Niño’ is not an official scientific classification. It is widely used to describe exceptionally strong El Niño events when sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific run at least 2°C above normal. These come round perhaps once a decade. The last three, in 1982/83, 1997/98 and 2015/16, are each remembered for the severe damages they left. The 2023-24 El Niño was one of the top five strongest ever recorded. This event had a dramatic global impact, triggering severe floods in Brazil and contributing significantly to making 2024 the hottest year on record.
Two things set this event apart. The first is its effect on temperature. A strong El Niño releases stored ocean heat into the atmosphere, adding a temporary 0.2°C to 0.3°C on top of the warming already driven by human emissions. With the past decade already the warmest on record, forecasters expect 2027 to be a candidate for the hottest year on record, with 2026 not far behind.
Global sea surface temperatures reached an unprecedented level in June 2026, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Marine Service. Scientists warn that the developing El Nino phenomenon could push both ocean and atmospheric temperatures even higher in the coming months, increasing the risk of more extreme weather events worldwide. The second is reach. What happens in the Pacific will not stay there. It will work through the global weather system from this summer into the next.
What is the impact of El Niño
El Niño redraws the map of where rain falls and it pulls harvests in opposite directions at once. Drought tends to cut cereal production across parts of Asia, Australia and southern Africa, at the same time as heavier rain lifts soybean yields in the Americas. The regions marked for drought this year run from the Caribbean and Central America to northern Brazil, central and northern India, central and southern Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia. In Indonesia, the government has already urged rice farmers to replant early, just 14 days after harvesting instead of observing the standard 25-day rest period. This quick start ensures rice gets enough water before the dry weather peaks ahead of the dry spell it expects El Niño to bring.
Several of these regions are among the world’s most important food-producing areas, supplying crops that keep the global food markets alive. This follows an already pressurised global landscape, with food systems strained by the US-Iran war and its resulting fuel and fertiliser shortages. Fertiliser has grown scarcer and dearer as the conflict disrupts energy markets and shipping, and fuel runs through the whole food chain, from fertiliser production to farm machinery to refrigeration and transport. A super El Niño lands on top of that, stacking drought, heat and flood risk onto a system with fewer tools left to absorb them. The 1982-83 El Niño led to USD 4.1 trillion in global income losses, while the 1997-98 El Niño cost about USD 5.7 trillion (Callahan & Mankin, 2023) The effects of this El Niño are already apparent in countries like India, which has just logged its fifth-driest June since records began in 1901, rainfall running almost 40 per cent short, and its weather service has forecast a below-average July, the main month for sowing. Farmers there have fallen behind on planting the summer staples that lean on those rains: rice, cotton, maize and soybeans.
Vital as it is, food is not the end of it. Agriculture feeds industry too, from cotton to rubber, so the disruption travels on into manufacturing and trade. Extreme heat drives energy demand up in some regions at the very moment supply tightens, because El Niño drains hydropower reservoirs, drags on the clean energy transition, and can close off mines through flash flooding. Infrastructure sits square in the path of the water: when a season’s rain falls in a week, it overwhelms roads, bridges, power grids and the systems that carry clean water.
Peru has now declared a state of emergency across 796 districts, about 40 per cent of the country’s total, spanning regions from Lima to Cusco and Arequipa, and running for 60 days, ahead of the intense rains and flooding the developing El Niño is expected to bring. The measure is preventive, giving national and regional authorities room to act before the rains fall rather than clear up after them. The fire risk is also greater. In areas where El Niño brings drier, warmer conditions, it lowers ignition thresholds and accelerates the spread of accidental, intentional and naturally ignited forest fires. The last two strong El Niños each burned more than 2.3 million hectares of Brazilian forest, over four times the annual average, according to data on WRI’s Global Forest Watch platform.
The climate finance lifeline does not stretch far enough
The super El Niño unfolds against a global economy already under intense financial strain. Geopolitical conflict has pushed food and fuel prices up, the AI boom is sending energy demand soaring, and investment keeps flowing into climate-vulnerable infrastructure and food systems. Adaptation, meanwhile, continues to receive not as much attention and investment as it requires. A 2022 Climate Policy Initiative report found that for every USD 1 spent on climate-resilient infrastructure, USD 87 went into infrastructure that builds in no climate resilience at all. A super El Niño will not create that exposure. It will find it.
This is precisely why climate finance must exist at the centre of the discussion. It is not development finance under a greener label. Its job is clearer and, at the same time, harder: to fund adaptation and mitigation, and to build resilience in economies facing both sudden shocks, the flood or the heatwave, and slow-onset change, the creeping drought and the rising sea. The trouble is the arithmetic. UNEP’s ‘2025 Adaptation Gap Report, Running on Empty,’ puts the adaptation finance needs of developing countries at USD 310 to USD 365 billion a year by 2035. International public adaptation finance came to just USD 26 billion in 2023, down on the year before. That leaves a shortfall of USD 284 to 339 billion a year, which is to say the need runs 12 to 14 times ahead of the money.
A gap that wide will not close on public funds alone. It calls for a different kind of financing: one that pulls private capital in through blended structures, prices climate risk into ordinary investment decisions, and puts resilience at the heart of a project rather than bolting it on at the end. Business as usual, the approach that built the exposure in the first place, is no longer on the table. What this necessitates is change at the level of the whole system.
Where what we do at E Co. comes in
This is the work E Co. has done for more than two decades. We support countries, governments and international financial institutions to bridge the finance gap and put climate mitigation and adaptation at the core of their investments. Achieving this requires undertaking the heavy lifting needed to mobilise dedicated climate resources such as the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility, and the Adaptation Fund or integrating a climate-focused perspective into investments that would otherwise fail to consider it.
The link to a super El Niño is direct. The risks it brings are precisely those our work is designed to address through targeted climate finance. Our support spans urban infrastructure, climate-resilient agriculture and climate-smart value chains, information support systems, and disaster risk reduction (DRR), all aimed at strengthening climate resilience for vulnerable communities
With our support the FAO on the ADAPT Jamaica project, the country was able to secure USD 50 million from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) for climate change resilience, the country’s first ever single-country GCF investment, reaching more than 700,000 people, around half of them women, across the six central parishes that grow roughly 70 per cent of the nation’s food. In Peru, now bracing for El Niño’s rains, we supported a GCF concept note for a multi-hazard early-warning system to give farmers advance notice of the very risks now bearing down on them. And in Mozambique, we formulated a GCF proposal to protect coastal communities in the Bons Sinais, Zambézia and Limpopo estuaries, using nature-based defences, rainwater harvesting and salt-tolerant livelihoods to shield more than 300,000 people from drought, floods, cyclones and creeping salinity.
A super El Niño will test the resilience the world has built and expose where resilience has yet to be financed. We already know where many of the greatest risks lie. Peru has declared a state of emergency, the Horn of Africa is preparing for another season of poor rains, and farmers in Indonesia are being urged to plant for drought conditions. These are responses to risks happening now. For us at E Co., the the work remains the same as it has always been: helping the most exposed countries reach the finance that protects them, and helping the institutions that hold the money put climate at the centre of what they back.
