A Super El Niño Threatens Crops, Shipping and Energy Systems

The returning El Niño is unusual not because the Pacific cycle itself is new, but because it is arriving in a climate already altered by human-caused warming. Akshat Rathi says scientists are concerned on two fronts: its prospective scale—“perhaps the biggest they have seen in recent history”—and the fact that it is unfolding in a world already 1.4°C hotter than the pre-industrial period.

El Niño is the warm phase of a natural Pacific Ocean cycle; La Niña is its cool phase. Lauren Rosenthal explains that an El Niño is declared when sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific rise more than 0.5°C above normal. But this event is not being assessed only at the surface. Jess Hicks says water temperatures below the surface matter too.

Rosenthal says the Pacific is predicted to warm by more than 2°C by year-end. That may sound modest, she says, but it represents substantial additional energy stored in the ocean. Hicks describes that energy as a battery: it can drive heat transport and evaporation, strengthening the event’s impacts.

Rathi defines climate change as the response to additional greenhouse gases emitted through fossil-fuel burning. The resulting increase in average global temperature is absorbed in large part by the ocean. El Niño is not caused by climate change, but climate change affects the conditions in which it occurs: an El Niño adds roughly 0.2°C to 0.3°C of warming on top of an already elevated global baseline.

The temperature record shown since 1950 depicts El Niño years pushing global temperatures above the long-term human-caused warming trend, while La Niña years pull them below it without reversing the trend. The oscillation remains cyclical; the floor beneath it has moved upward. For Rathi, that means existing heat waves, wildfires and floods can become more extreme. He says 2027, expected to be the hottest year ever, may offer “just a flavor” of what life on the current climate trajectory could look like in 2035.

The consequences are not distributed evenly. El Niño’s wet and dry zones radiate outward from the equator, placing many of its most severe impacts in the tropics—where productive farmland is concentrated and where large numbers of people depend on agriculture for income and food.

India illustrates volatility rather than a simple shortage of rain. It had its fifth-driest June on record, followed by July flooding that delivered a month’s worth of precipitation in a single week. Lauren Rosenthal calls it India’s worst monsoon since the last El Niño. Akshat Rathi notes that the monsoon is central to an economy that still relies heavily on agriculture.

In West Africa, those effects can travel into consumer markets. Jess Hicks identifies the region as a cocoa-production hot spot and says cocoa growth and yields are already being affected. The likely implications, she says, are higher prices in 2027 and potential quality issues. The cocoa-price chart shows sharp spikes during the 2023–24 El Niño event, reaching roughly $12,000 per ton.

Somalia represents more immediate humanitarian exposure. Communities are preparing for dry conditions to shift into torrential flooding like that seen during the prior El Niño. Abdirahman Mohamed describes the 2023 floods as devastating: water rose over a bridge connecting a village and town, leaving people unable to obtain food, water and other essentials. He says the current “super El Niño” could exceed both 2023 and 1997.

Mohamed Abdi describes an embankment built to manage water flow. In normal periods, he says, water reaches roughly one meter; during abnormal El Niño flooding, it has risen above 3.5 to 4 meters, overtopping the embankment and destroying farms. Ocean-temperature anomalies become, locally, a question of whether roads remain passable, farms remain intact and essentials can reach people.

El Niño is often framed through global temperature records, but Jess Hicks calls it “a global hydro story.” Water scarcity and excessive rainfall do not merely damage local agriculture; they can constrain infrastructure through which global trade moves.

Panama is the central example. Akshat Rathi says El Niño can reduce rainfall there. Canal traffic plunged in 2024 during drought associated with the last El Niño, and the canal authority is already taking water-conservation measures this year through cargo limits.

Lauren Rosenthal argues that the disruption cannot be contained within Panama. A global supply chain means major weather disruptions can “wreak a lot of havoc”; canal constraints can affect flows of liquefied natural gas and, in turn, energy prices. Crop losses and food-security pressures likewise travel through supply chains, turning local rainfall failures and flooding into wider exposure.

Earlier El Niño events suggest the scale and persistence of those costs, although the full toll of the present event may not be known for years. Rosenthal says the El Niño that ended in 1998 caused about $5.7 trillion in damage and continued to ripple through global economies for five years after the event ended.

The Science study cited uses a different measure: it estimates long-term reductions in global economic productivity of $4.1 trillion from the 1982–83 El Niño and $5.7 trillion from the 1997–98 event. Rathi says more recent El Niños are expected to cost still more, in the trillions.

El Niño’s timing is predictable only in broad physical terms, while its effects depend on where rain falls, where drought persists and what systems are already under pressure. Lauren Rosenthal is guarded about precise forecasting because El Niño arrives infrequently enough that its effects are difficult to fully anticipate, even as this event has the potential to be historic in power.

The decision-relevant risk is not confined to the places first hit by heat, drought or flood. A Pacific warming cycle amplified by a hotter baseline can pass through agricultural output, food prices, shipping capacity and energy flows before its aggregate economic damage is visible. By the time losses can be counted, the disruption may already have moved well beyond the regions where it began.