UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : Joint Press Conference: OCHA / WMO - El Niño is set to hit fragile communities hard

UN agencies appeal for help to protect weakest from unprecedented El Niño

Two UN agencies teamed up on Wednesday to issue an appeal for immediate assistance to help communities already being impacted by the strongest El Niño on record.

The current El Niño event could be "unprecedented in strength, literally, off the monitoring charts that we have used for the past four decades and will peak towards the end of 2026, but its impacts will be felt long after that,” said Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

According to the latest Global Seasonal Climate Update from WMO, sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific – the epicentre of El Niño – may rise to 3.8C above average between November 2026 and January 2027.

While a Pacific Ocean surface temperature anomaly of 0.5C above normal is enough to trigger an El Niño alert by WMO, Ms. Saulo highlighted concerns that the impact of an El Niño fuelled by a 3.8C gap has no precedent.

Previous El Niños linked to anomalies of 3C have brought “very substantive impacts across the world” but “we are beyond that limit, out of our records, out of our statistics of what we can expect”, the agency chief stressed.

“We are already witnessing extreme weather events and expect this to multiply and cascade as El Niño intensifies,” Ms. Saulo noted. “But a powerful El Niño does not have to be a recipe for humanitarian disaster; we have the science forecasts, the early warnings to save lives and protect livelihoods.”

Echoing Ms. Saulo’s appeal for prevention efforts to boost resilience among the world’s most vulnerable communities, the UN’s emergency relief chief, Tom Fletcher, described the new El Niño as a “behemoth…a wrecking ball that will likely tear through Latin America, eastern and southern Africa, Asia and the Pacific with extreme heat, droughts and floods”.

The next two weeks will be critical to averting a worsening humanitarian crisis linked to El Niño, Mr. Fletcher said, adding that Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya urgently need funding and emergency supplies in place before heavy rains arrive. In southern Africa, the priority is to deliver seeds and safeguard livestock, while Central America requires immediate support to protect livelihoods.

Across Asia and the Pacific, countries must brace for a range of climate shocks, including droughts, floods and cyclones. “It would be an extraordinary failure to see this crisis coming, to hear the predictions from the experts, and yet still squander the opportunity to protect people in its path,” the UN emergency relief chief warned.

Some 50 million people could face increased hunger because of the weather phenomenon, he stressed, before citing an African Development Bank estimate that it will cost African countries between $10 and $20 billion “and drive down GDP by between one and two per cent”.

To support resilience efforts, the UN’s top aid official announced that he has released more than $50 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund to help 11 countries on the front line, including Chad, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan.

The long-term impact “will be felt for months and potentially years to come”, Mr. Fletcher continued, citing the additional strains placed on the humanitarian system by the global supply chain crunch in the Strait of Hormuz and the Black Sea, linked to war between Iran and the United States and the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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Joint Press Conference: OCHA / WMO - El Niño is set to hit fragile communities hard

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