El Niño Is Coming Into a Hotter World, Raising the Stakes for Global Food Security

A strengthening El Niño is raising the risk of drought, flooding and crop disruption across several major food-producing regions. The UN says governments have an unusual advantage: the danger can be tracked months in advance, making preparedness, finance and early action decisive for the next harvest.

A stronger El Niño is taking shape at the worst possible time for fragile food systems. As the Pacific warms and weather patterns begin to shift, the UN is warning that drought, flooding and crop disruption could intensify across several vulnerable food-producing regions.

This is crucial for food security. A failed harvest is rarely the beginning of a crisis. By the time food shortages, price pressures or humanitarian needs become visible, many of the decisions that shaped the outcome, from seed selection and planting dates to water storage and livestock protection, have already been made.

The real breakthrough is not prediction, but lead time

Meteorological forecasting has changed the economics of preparedness. The World Meteorological Organization expects the current El Niño to become very strong, while warning that its eventual peak will not mark the end of its effects. So, governments have a period in which risk is elevated but many losses have not yet occurred.

FAO adds an agricultural layer to that warning. By combining more than four decades of past El Niño impacts with seasonal forecasts and food-insecurity data, the agency says it can identify vulnerable areas at resolutions of roughly one square kilometre in some cases. Precision of that kind changes the policy conversation because it reduces uncertainty about where early resources might have the greatest value.

Better forecasts, however, create their own accountability problem. Limited knowledge once allowed governments to argue that agricultural shocks were too uncertain to prepare for efficiently. Increasingly detailed warnings weaken that defence, especially where the likely interventions are already well understood.

The UN points to drought-resistant seeds, stronger water storage, healthier soils, livestock protection and warnings delivered early enough for farmers to alter planting dates or crop choices. FAO's Kaveh Zahedi says some measures need to be in place by February or March to protect the next harvest, meaning delay has an agricultural cost even before a drought or flood reaches its maximum intensity.

One El Niño can produce very different food crises

Treating El Niño as a single global drought would obscure the nature of the threat. FAO sees a high chance of agricultural drought in Southern Africa and the Sahel, Central America's Dry Corridor and parts of South and Southeast Asia, while other locations could experience excessive rainfall, flooding or disruption to fisheries from unusually warm waters.

Food-system risk is geographically uneven and economically diverse. A grain-producing area suffering drought creates a different problem from a coastal community facing fisheries losses, while flooding can damage crops, transport links and storage even where water scarcity is not the main concern.

Such variation also means the global consequences may emerge through several channels at once. Local crop failures can weaken rural incomes and food availability, while simultaneous production problems across multiple regions can tighten markets and increase pressure on households already spending large shares of their income on food.

The previous strong El Niño period provides a measure of what can happen when climatic stress reaches already vulnerable agricultural systems. According to the UN, Morocco's cereal yields fell 43 per cent amid extreme heat and drought during 2023-24, while Southern Africa experienced its worst drought in more than a century, leaving 61 million people needing assistance and pushing more than eight million into food insecurity.

Climate finance is arriving in the wrong proportions

Governments have better tools for identifying agricultural vulnerability, yet the amount of climate-related development finance reaching agrifood systems is falling. A forthcoming FAO analysis says such finance declined by 10 per cent in 2024 to $26.9 billion. Crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries received only about five per cent of total climate-related development finance, while agrifood financing in Africa fell by 20 per cent even as overall climate-related development finance to the continent increased.

The issue is not simply whether climate finance is increasing in aggregate. Allocation matters. Food production depends on sectors where adaptation often requires spending before losses occur, yet those sectors appear to be receiving a relatively small share of climate-related development funding.

Agricultural timing makes the mismatch even more consequential. Emergency finance released after drought destroys crops may support households through a crisis, but it cannot retroactively restore a planting season. Money for resilient seeds, irrigation, soil management or livestock protection has greater preventive value when it arrives before farmers make irreversible seasonal decisions.

El Niño exposes a broader weakness in climate policy: sophisticated risk information can coexist with inadequate investment in the places where that information needs to be converted into action.

El Niño is becoming a rehearsal for permanent climate adaptation

The current episode should not be understood only as a temporary disruption that ends when Pacific temperatures normalise. Many of the measures required for El Niño preparedness are the same ones needed for agriculture in a warmer, more volatile climate.

FAO identifies improved water management, resilient crops and livestock, healthier soils and stronger ecosystems as tools that serve both immediate preparedness and longer-term adaptation. Land restoration, agroforestry and more sustainable livestock and aquaculture can also support food security while contributing to biodiversity and emissions goals, according to the UN. That overlap changes how governments might evaluate preparedness spending. Investments made ahead of El Niño do not necessarily become redundant once the event passes. A water-storage system, healthier soil or stronger early-warning network can remain useful through future droughts, heatwaves and rainfall volatility.

A hotter baseline makes that point harder to ignore. Zahedi has warned that the current El Niño is developing in a warmer world, potentially magnifying some impacts. The danger is therefore not simply that an established climate cycle has returned, but that the same cycle is now interacting with environmental conditions different from those of previous decades.

Governments consequently face two clocks. One is seasonal, with decisions needed quickly enough to influence the next harvest. The other is structural, requiring agricultural systems to become less vulnerable to repeated climate shocks over many years.