EL NIÑO IS COMING -- AND IT´S GOING TO BE BAD / FOREIGN POLICY

El Niño Is Coming—and It’s Going to Be Bad

The weather-related hazards will hit hardest in countries that are ill-equipped for the economic and political fallout.

By Cullen Hendrix, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

View of the dried lake of La Sabana Metropolitan Park in San Jose, Costa Rica, on May 14, 2019. The lake was affected by droughts caused by El Niño. EZEQUIEL BECERRA/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is now forecasting a moderate-to-strong El Niño season to continue through February 2024. 

The forecast itself mostly piques the interests of meteorologists, oceanographers, fishers, and the global network of food commodity traders and crop insurers whose fortunes live and die in the technical arcana of the weather report.

But this forecast has vast implications: Even a typical El Niño can reduce harvests for important crops, increase the disease burden, hammer developing and middle-income countries’ economic prospects, increase armed conflict risk in the tropics, and fuel maritime conflict and territorial ambitions in the East and South China Seas.

Some of these challenges—such as civil wars and maritime conflict in the South China Sea—would manifest as immediate, hurricane-like clear and present dangers. 

But many would not. 

Like climate change, perhaps the greater danger lays in the accumulation of thousands of small cracks in the global food, public health, and other systems that are the bedrock of life.

Most of these hazards will hit hardest in countries that are ill-equipped for the economic and political fallout. 

They add urgency to easing developing and middle-income countries’ debt burdens and building more resilience into the global food system. 

For the United States, they highlight the need to adopt a more comprehensive strategy for defining national security threats and government responses to them.

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a cyclic pattern of warming and cooling in the waters of the east-central Pacific Ocean. 

ENSO oscillates between cool (La Niña) and warm (El Niño) phases at intervals averaging five to seven years. 

Climate change is giving ENSO a “push,” making the swings back and forth deeper and potentially longer lasting. 

The currently forming El Niño follows a rare “triple dip” La Niña that ended in June lasted nearly three years—the longest in over 50 years.

But what happens in the east-central Pacific doesn’t stay there.

As Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Josh Willis has said, “When the Pacific speaks, the whole world listens.” 

ENSO is the single most important driver of year-to-year variation in global climate. 

ENSO’s teleconnections—links between weather phenomena separated by vast distances—shape weather across the southern United States, Africa, Latin America, and closer to “home” in Southeast Asia and Oceania. 

They cause or strengthen droughts as well as extreme rainfall events and affect temperature and humidity levels over much of the world.

Both El Niños and La Niñas cause weather-related hazards. 

The crushing three-year drought that’s been devastating the Horn of Africa since October 2020? 

It’s partly a result of that triple-dip La Niña. 

South America’s severe drought, gripping many of the world’s most significant grain exporters? 

ENSO’s effect is there, too. 

Ditto for drought in the U.S. south and southwest. 

The transition to an El Niño will likely bring some relief to these areas, though that “relief” has come to the Horn in the form of torrential rains and flooding that burst the banks of the Juba and Shabelle rivers and forced 300,000 Ethiopians and Somalis from their homes. 

This whipsawing between extremes is the “push” climate change is providing.

But more broadly, the effects aren’t symmetrical. 

Shifting from La Niña to El Niño conditions doesn’t just redistribute good and bad weather around the globe. 

El Niños come with much more downside risks to global food supplies, public health, economic recovery in the global south, as well as to peace and stability – in the Global South where its impacts are most acute, but also in East Asia.

Let’s start with food. 

Though global food prices are down a bit from record highs following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they are still among the highest prices seen in the last 60 years. 

And these prices don’t yet fully reflect the effect of Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and attacks on Ukrainian export infrastructure, both of which further weaponize Russia’s role in food markets and have led prices to begin creeping back up at a time when more than 250 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity.

Some qualified good news: In the past, El Niños haven’t caused global food prices to spike, with price effects being relatively modest. 

A multinational team of scientists found both El Niños and La Niñas suppress global yields for maize, rice, and wheat, with the effects of El Niño particularly strong for maize. 

On average, El Niños slightly reduce global food supply, though the effects are typically modest and can be offset by planting more acreage to offset lower productivity.

But at the country or regional level, as in western and southern Africa, the effects can be quite strong, sending local prices higher and increasing rural unemployment. 

El Niño effects for food production aren’t confined to land, either. 

The warming of the West-Central Pacific suppresses catches for important fisheries like the Peruvian anchoveta—the world’s most productive fishery—and in heavily fished areas like the East and South China Seas.

The effects of weather-related crop failures on food markets operate on two levels. 

First, they constrict actual supply in a market where demand is both constantly growing and price-inelastic: The prevailing price doesn’t change biological necessities. 

Second, they shape current expectations about future production and thus hedging behavior. 

Expecting a bad harvest, buyers with the means and the foresight—like China—may begin stockpiling grains in anticipation of failed harvests or potential market disruptions.

In the past, these activities have only had modest effects on prices. 

Yet this time may be different. 

These hedging strategies are now being implemented in the context of rising economic nationalism in which governments—especially authoritarian ones—are resorting to export bans to address concerns about domestic food shortages and explicitly weaponizing food trade; that is, they are occurring in markets that are more risky than in the recent past. 

This could be bad news for a global food security picture already hammered by the Ukraine war and the lingering effects of coronavirus-related supply chain disruptions.

Speaking of the coronavirus: A strong El Niño could increase the infectious disease burden. 

Analyzing the strong El Niño of 2014 to 2015, researchers found increases in cases of plague in Colorado and New Mexico, cholera in Tanzania, and dengue fever in Brazil and Southeast Asia. 

In the U.S. southwest and Tanzania, the culprit was wetter-than-normal conditions that increased the abundance of plague-carrying fleas and overwhelmed drainage and sanitation systems, causing drinking water to become contaminated with cholera. 

In Brazil and Southeast Asia, higher temperatures and droughts had a more complicated impact: Bereft of standing water in the natural environment, mosquitos penetrated further and in larger numbers into urban areas with open water sources, then matured more rapidly—and developed more voracious appetites, thus infecting more people.

At the macro scale, the economic losses from El Niños can be significant. 

Failed crops are foregone income that drive up demand for imports. 

Burst riverbanks and dams must be repaired and often come with considerable damage to infrastructure such as roads and electricity grids, which are critical for the normal functioning of the economy.

But that’s just a fraction of the story. 

A recent article in Science by Christopher Callahan and Justin Mankin attributes massive economic losses to the persistent negative effects of El Niños on growth, estimating total global losses of $5.7 trillion from the 1997 to 1998 El Niño.

That’s an enormous number. 

But it’s not as if the world lost nearly a sixth of total economic output in 1998 (world GDP was roughly $31.5 trillion at the time). 

Many of those effects emerged in the years after the event due to the compounding effects of forgone growth investment—the same reason money saved now is worth more than money saved later—and the high costs of building back after associated natural disasters such as floods and mudslides. 

And because we never “see” foregone growth due to lack of investment or diversion of resources from building new schools to repairing roads, we don’t typically think of these losses when counting up the economic consequences of natural disasters. 

It’s an example of how many of the costs of climate-related events are almost imperceptible in the moment but add up to real (and large) numbers.

The estimates reported in the Science article are orders of magnitude above previous ones of El Niño–associated economic losses. 

While some economists have questioned the astounding size of these estimates, even losses in parts of Africa and countries where the historic relationship between El Niños and GDP growth is strongest—such as Peru, Ghana, and Indonesia—could still wind up being in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

El Niño’s effects for economic growth and food supplies help us understand one of its other consequences: elevated risk of civil conflict. 

Over a decade ago, Solomon Hsiang, Kyle Meng, and Mark Cane found that civil conflicts—armed conflicts between rebels and governments—were more than twice as likely to break out during El Niños relative to La Niñas in world regions whose local climate is affected by ENSO teleconnections, with conflict outbreaks clustering between July and November. 

In doing so, their study was the first to link climate at the global scale with armed conflict, a topic that is now the subject of exhaustive study and discussion.

When studying climate impacts on conflict, researchers almost never find a smoking gun. 

To date, no rebel leader has cited El Niño as their rallying cause. 

Rather, what researchers find is that climatic factors “load the dice,” making conflict marginally likelier to occur. 

Again, the impact is hard to detect in any given conflict but emerges from analyzing hundreds if not thousands of conflict events over time.

El Niño’s adverse consequences for fisheries also increase the risk of militarized conflict on the seas. 

Of particular concern are its effects in the East and South China Seas, where the impact on fish populations is strong, fishing pressure is high, and the regions’ major fishing nations—China, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan among them—have tense security relationships in the best of times. 

While it’s extremely unlikely a Taiwan invasion would begin over a fisheries dispute, these types of militarized conflicts are one of the few scenarios in international affairs where the coast guards and navies of rival countries may come into conflict over the actions of third parties—such as fishing vessels crossing disputed maritime boundaries—that they do not command or control.

Facing these potential outcomes, what can be done? 

Countries with strong ENSO teleconnections—which are mostly developing and middle-income—need resources and budgetary space to address problems such as rising food import bills, disaster preparedness and relief, and adequate provisioning for their security forces.

For this reason, creditor countries—especially China and those in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—need to address the large debt overhangs many of these countries accumulated during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Ghana’s $3 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund is a signal that creditor countries, including China, can work together to address these challenges.

Consistent with the increasing role armed forces are playing in disaster response and relief, countries such as the United States may be called upon to provide more emergency services that leverage their considerable airlift capacity and ability to move medical supplies and emergency food aid in difficult circumstances.

Stepping back from immediate responses, a bigger picture take-home point emerges for the U.S. government. 

The evidence of strong, adverse health, economic, and security consequences has made clear that the conventional approaches to defining national security interests and threats are lacking. 

Climate impacts—El Niños among them—are security impacts, but identifying and responding to them shouldn’t be the exclusive domain of national security and intelligence agencies like the Department of Defense and National Security Council. 

The Biden administration has done more to mainstream climate security than any of its predecessors—but there is far more work to be done.

Cullen Hendrix is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonresident senior research fellow at the Center for Climate and Security, and a contributing author to the 2022 IPCC report for which he assessed climate risks to peace and human mobility.