El Niño: The coming super storm 

Shahin Ashraf, Head of Global Advocacy at Islamic Relief, explains that one of the most powerful climate events on earth — El Niño — is now developing, and what this means for all of Earth’s citizens.

This morning, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the UN’s weather and climate body, published a bulletin that deserves far more than a passing headline. It confirmed that one of the most powerful climate events on earth – El Niño – is now developing. And if the forecasts are right, what’s coming could be one of the worst on record.

As an aid worker, I’ve spent years responding to crises that the world could have seen coming. Reading this report, I felt that same knot in my stomach you get when you know what’s ahead and you’re not sure the world is paying attention.

I want to try to explain what this actually means. Not in the language of climate science, but in the language of everyday life – grocery bills, missed harvests, and children who go to bed hungry.

What is El Niño?

Every few years, a vast stretch of the Pacific Ocean warms up more than usual. That might sound remote and irrelevant. But that warming reshuffles weather patterns across the entire planet. Rains that farmers in East Africa depend on to grow food either vanish, or arrive as catastrophic floods. Droughts grip parts of Southeast Asia and southern Africa. Heatwaves intensify across multiple continents. The whole system tips.

Scientists are increasingly concerned that the warm water will fuel a “super” or “Godzilla” El Niño, potentially prolonging marine heatwaves, disrupting fisheries and ecosystems, and intensifying global climate impacts well into 2027. Crucially, it is arriving into a world that is already hotter than it has ever been in our lifetimes, because of decades of carbon emissions. The combination of a supercharged El Niño on top of an already warming planet is keeping climate scientists up at night.

And no, we cannot stop El Niño itself. It is a natural ocean cycle, as old as the planet. But here is the critical point: we cannot change the phenomenon, but we absolutely can change how much it hurts people. The difference between a weather event and a catastrophe is not the weather. It is what we do, or fail to do, before it arrives.

Climate crisis alongside conflict

Let me be specific, because this is where the science becomes human.

Imagine you are a mother in rural Somalia. You grow sorghum. You have a small plot of land, a few animals, and children to feed. Your children’s health, their schooling, whether you can afford medicine when they fall ill, depends on the rains arriving at the right time. El Niño disrupts those rains. The harvest fails, or floods wash it away before you can gather it. There is no supermarket down the road. There is no food bank. There is no government safety net. And in Somalia, there is something else too: armed groups who exploit hunger, who recruit from desperate families, who make it harder for aid to reach the people who need it most.

This is the reality that too many climate conversations miss. In the places El Niño will hit hardest, the climate crisis does not arrive alone. It arrives alongside conflict, displacement and political instability and each one makes the others worse.

In Yemen, years of war have already decimated farming, destroyed irrigation systems and cut off supply routes. When El Niño disrupts rainfall patterns across the region, there is almost no buffer left. Families who were already surviving on the edge have nothing more to give.

In Sudan, a country torn apart by conflict, climate shocks have driven farmers from their land and pushed millions into hunger. El Niño will deepen every one of those fractures.

In Pakistan, where catastrophic flooding in 2022 submerged a third of the country and displaced millions, the combination of an active El Niño and intensifying monsoon patterns raises the prospect of renewed devastation on a staggering scale.

In Bangladesh, one of the most climate-vulnerable countries on earth, rising seas, fiercer cyclones and erratic rainfall are already reshaping where people can live and how they survive.

Now multiply all of this by millions. During the last major El Niño in 2015 and 2016, more than 60 million people were pushed into food crisis in a single year. That is nearly the entire population of the United Kingdom, unable to reliably feed their families. And that was before climate change had pushed global temperatures as high as they are today.

A vicious cycle

At Islamic Relief, we work in around 40 countries, many of them directly in the path of what’s coming. These aren’t dots on a map to us. They are communities we know, families we work alongside, people whose trust we have earned over years of working on the ground.

And what I can tell you from that experience is this: the landscape we are operating in is changing faster than many people realise. The crises are getting longer, deeper and more entangled. A drought that once lasted a season now lingers for years. A flood that was once a rare shock now returns before communities have recovered from the last one. Conflict and climate feed each other in a vicious cycle: climate stress drives competition for water and land, which fuels violence, which destroys the farms and infrastructure that might have helped communities survive the next climate shock.

El Niño will accelerate all of this. It will stretch humanitarian systems that are already overloaded and underfunded. It will push families who were just beginning to recover back into crisis. And it will force aid agencies like ours into impossible choices about where to focus when the need is everywhere at once.

We cannot keep responding to the same predictable emergencies year after year and call it a strategy. Acting early before harvests fail, before displacement begins, before children become acutely malnourished, saves far more lives than emergency response after disasters. The WMO has just handed governments and donors a window of opportunity. Every week that passes without action closes that window a little further.

A global issue

It might be tempting to think this is someone else’s problem. It isn’t.

When droughts and floods destroy harvests across multiple countries at once, global food prices rise and you feel it at the checkout. The wheat, the rice, the cooking oil on your shelf, travels through supply chains that run through exactly the regions El Niño hits hardest. The UK’s own climate advisers have flagged that heatwaves, flooding and water shortages are growing risks here too.

And when harvests fail and families lose everything, people move. Climate shocks are one of the biggest drivers of displacement in the world. The instability that fills our news feeds does not happen in a vacuum it is fed, in no small part, by a climate system under strain.

Can we change anything?

El Niño itself? No. But the world it strikes? Absolutely.

We can unlock emergency preparedness funding now before harvests fail, not after. We can make the financial mechanisms agreed at climate summits actually work, so that communities on the frontline receive the support they were promised. We can invest in early warning systems, drought-resistant crops, flood defences and the kind of long-term resilience that means a bad season doesn’t become a famine.

And we can choose to see the people in the path of this storm not as distant victims of a natural disaster, but as human beings caught in a crisis that the wealthiest, highest-emitting nations of the world have helped create.

There is an Islamic concept of amanah, meaning stewardship, the responsibility to care for what has been entrusted to you. The earth. Its people. The children who will inherit what we leave behind. We have been given knowledge of what is coming. What we choose to do with that knowledge is a moral question, not just a political one.

The bottom line

A mother in Somalia doesn’t know what El Niño is. She just knows that last year the rains came late, her harvest was thin, and she had to make choices no parent should have to make. She doesn’t need a climate summit. She needs someone to act before it happens again and before it gets worse.

We can see this super storm coming. The only question now is whether we have the will to act on it.

Islamic Relief supports people affected by climate and other crises across the world. Please donate today to help us support those most in need.