El Niño in 2026, the Cascading Hazards and the Timely Opening for Early Action

*A strong El Niño is a forecast we can already read. It is also a test of whether we are willing to act on what we know, in the closing months before what we know becomes what we are too late to prevent.*

The World Meteorological Organization, in its early-June 2026 update, confirms that El Niño conditions are developing. WMO puts the likelihood of an El Niño event during June to August 2026 at around 80 percent, with probabilities near or above 90 percent that the event will continue at least into November. Most forecast models suggest the event will be at least moderate, with the possibility of reaching strong intensity, and El Niño cycles typically last nine to twelve months once established. That is not a prediction in the loose sense. It is a forecast on which an entire architecture of anticipatory response now rests. The question is no longer whether the next twelve months will see a major El Niño-driven shock. The question is whether the system that has been built to act before the shock arrives will actually do so this time, or whether we will once again let the window close and respond at twice the cost to half the people.

I have watched the field move from a posture of "we cannot see this coming" to one of "we can see it coming, and we have an operational answer." The technology has arrived. The financing instruments exist. The frameworks are in place. What remains, with a strong El Niño now developing, is the decision.

El Niño is one of the few climate phenomena that does not require a leap of inference. The geographies it tends to hit, and the directions in which it tends to pull them, are well understood and stable across cycles. FAO's June 2026 agricultural risk assessment puts the current cycle at greater than 50 percent probability of agricultural drought across large parts of southern Africa, including Namibia, Botswana, Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and parts of Mozambique and Madagascar. The same assessment puts Central America and the Caribbean at 70 percent probability of below-normal rainfall, with the highest risk concentrated along the Dry Corridor, in Colombia and Venezuela, and in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. FAO extends the agricultural drought belt across the Sahel from Senegal through Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria, eastward into Ethiopia and Sudan, and into Asia from Pakistan and India through Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet Nam, and on to the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor-Leste.

The scale of what this can do is not hypothetical. As documented by FAO, the 2015–2016 El Niño affected more than 60 million people across eastern and southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Asia-Pacific region. The pathway was multi-sectoral: severe drought, flooding and temperature anomalies cascading into crop failures, livestock losses, food insecurity, water-system stress, and the protection and displacement consequences that follow when livelihoods collapse across whole agro-ecological zones at once. The 2023–2024 cycle hit southern Africa hard enough to trigger region-wide drought emergencies, parallel emergency appeals through OCHA, WFP and FAO, and the loss of pasture and livestock that, in FAO's framing, "quickly becomes a loss of assets and wealth" in regions where livestock underpins both food security and household income.

What is different now, and what the rest of this argument turns on, is that the forecast is reaching us at a moment when we already have the instruments to translate it into protection. The map exists. The triggers exist. The funding instruments exist. What is being tested is institutional speed.

El Niño never acts in isolation. It interacts with existing conflict, debt distress, agricultural fragility, public-health systems and the climate trajectory it is itself layered onto. In every cycle, the same pattern repeats. Rainfall anomalies drive crop failures and livestock losses. Crop failures and livestock losses drive food insecurity, distress sales of productive assets, and migration. Migration drives protection risks. Public-health pressure follows the disrupted water, sanitation and nutrition pathway. By the time the formal humanitarian appeal is launched, what started as a meteorological deviation has become a multi-sectoral, multi-year erosion of the household and institutional capacity the country needs to absorb the next shock.

Macroeconomic research on the cost of strong El Niño cycles consistently finds measurable GDP losses in vulnerable countries and lifts in public debt that weaken the fiscal capacity of the very governments expected to lead the response. The implication is the one most practitioners have only described qualitatively. El Niño is a development shock as much as a climate shock. Viewed in that frame, anticipatory action is not a humanitarian nice-to-have. It is the cheapest available form of fiscal protection for low-income states already running thin.

The cascading nature of the impact also means there is no single window for action. The agricultural window opens first, before planting decisions are made for the affected season. The food-security and protection windows open as those decisions take effect. The health window opens as floods or drought interact with disease vectors. Each sector has its own trigger window, and each window forfeits its highest-return action if missed. I have written before about why building systems governments can actually own is the precondition for any of this to work at scale, and the cascading geography of El Niño impacts is exactly the test case that argument was built for.

For most of the last decade, the operational case for anticipatory action rested on logic. It was obvious that preventing a livestock loss should cost less than replacing the herd, that a cash transfer arriving before a price spike should reach further than one arriving after. The argument was intuitive, but the evidence base was thin.

That has changed. The pattern is now visible across geographies and methodologies, and it is unusually consistent.

In the Horn of Africa, modelling published on the economics of resilience and early action across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia finds that every US$1 invested in resilience and anticipatory action generates between US$2.3 and US$3.3 in net benefits once avoided losses are counted. That is not an outlier. The 2023–2024 El Niño drought response in southern Africa, evaluated by CGIAR, yielded a 30 percent net benefit on anticipatory investment. The same dollar, delivered early, carried the impact of US$1.30 delivered after the worst of the drought had landed.

Multi-country analysis from FAO on anticipatory action ahead of drought finds avoided losses worth up to US$3 for every US$1 invested. The Anticipation Hub's "An approach that works" briefing consolidates this into the most defensible operational claim the sector currently has. The FAO/OCHA/WFP evidence base reinforces the same finding. Anticipatory action, evaluated on its own terms, produces multiples of post-event response in both cost-efficiency and outcome quality.

When evidence converges this consistently across institutions, methodologies and contexts, the appropriate response is no longer to ask whether it is true. It is to ask why the system still defaults to post-event response.

The case for acting on the 2026–2027 El Niño is not only an evidence case. It is an infrastructure case. We have never entered an El Niño cycle as well-prepared as this one.

Anticipatory action frameworks are now operational across dozens of countries through FAO's anticipatory action portfolio, the WFP Anticipatory Action Fund, IFRC's DREF, the Start Network's Start Fund and Start Ready, backed by improving impact-based forecasting and stronger inter-agency coordination. For the 2026 cycle, these agencies have already activated frameworks for El Niño-driven hazards in Central America, East Africa and the Sahel, releasing pre-arranged anticipatory funding to communities in advance of the impact. That is not a sign that the system has solved the problem. It is a sign that the system can act at scale before the worst of the impact lands.

What makes this moment unusual is the alignment of three things at once. A clear forecast on a well-understood hazard. A convergent evidence base on the returns of acting early. And an operational architecture that has reached the point where activation is the binding decision, not the binding capability.

Regional preparedness is moving in step. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the IFRC has set out how the region is preparing for the 2026 El Niño impact, with national societies pre-positioning supplies and triggering anticipatory protocols across drought- and flood-exposed areas. In other words, the constraint is no longer technical. It is whether the institutions that hold the trigger are willing to pull it.

The most important thing to understand about anticipatory action is that its effectiveness is not constant across the timeline of a hazard. It is highest in the narrow window when the forecast is reliable enough to justify confident action and the lead time is long enough for the action to matter. Outside that window, every week of delay erodes the return.

Once impacts begin to materialise, the calculus inverts. The cheapest interventions, the early water-system maintenance, the pre-positioned livestock fodder, the cash transferred before food prices spike, are no longer available. What replaces them is more expensive, less effective, and reaches fewer people. The argument that "we should wait until we are sure" sounds prudent in a conference room. In an operational sense, it forfeits the most cost-effective chance to protect lives and livelihoods.

For the 2026–2027 cycle, the window is narrowing now. The agricultural decisions for the affected season in southern Africa are being made in the coming weeks. The pre-positioning decisions for eastern Africa flood-prone districts have a lead time of months, not seasons. The window is not closing dramatically. It is closing by attrition, one missed agricultural cycle and one delayed pre-positioning decision at a time.

The binding constraint, in other words, is speed of decision and flexibility of funding. Not capability.

The audience for this argument is not a single institution. It is a set of actors with different levers, and the call to action looks different from each desk.

For humanitarian practitioners, the immediate task is to read the forecasts for location-specific risk, unlock the flexible and pooled financing that can move on a calendar a hazard sets, coordinate under humanitarian leadership and the AA Working Groups already in place, and treat trigger readiness, threshold settings, pre-positioning and simulation as live operational priorities for the next quarter. The single most important shift is to fund local actors to lead the response, not merely to implement an externally designed one. Local responders hold the operational knowledge the trigger architecture needs to land usefully, and the experience of the last two cycles is that the responses that worked best are the ones that local institutions owned.

For the wider humanitarian community, the call is to design for compounding drivers. An anticipatory response that addresses drought but not the conflict context it interacts with, or the price-shock economy it lands in, or the public-health vulnerability it amplifies, will run into the same wall the sector keeps hitting. El Niño 2026–2027 is multi-sectoral by design. Single-sector responses, however well executed, will under-perform what a coordinated one could deliver.

For donors, the lever is the one that decides whether any of the above is actually possible. Disbursements need to accelerate. No-regrets investments need backing. Reprogramming flexibility needs to be available where existing portfolios can be repurposed. Existing pooled instruments, CERF, IFRC DREF, the Start Fund and Start Ready, FAO SFERA, and the WFP Anticipatory Action Fund, need to be scaled and crisis modifiers fast-tracked. Anticipatory action does not lack institutional homes. It lacks the speed at which money moves through them.

A strong El Niño is one of the only major shocks the modern climate system gives us with this much notice. The forecast is in. The evidence is in. The operational architecture is in. The tools, the instruments and the lessons of the last cycle are all on the table. What remains is the decision to act inside a window that will not stay open.

We have spent a decade building the capacity to read this kind of forecast and act on it. The 2026–2027 cycle is the test of whether we will let what we built do its job.

*Tags: Anticipatory Action · Early Warning · Climate Finance*