“These shifts matter because they can turn a short-lived climate shock into a longer-lasting risk,” he wrote. If soil moisture stays below normal for several years, crops are exposed to repeated heat and water stress across multiple growing seasons with “direct consequences for food production and water security.”
Adapting to a changing baseline
The potential for more destructive physical impacts raises deeper concerns about how societies that developed under relatively stable climate conditions will function in a world with shifting baselines and sharper swings between droughts and floods, more intense tropical storms, expanded fire seasons and long-lasting unseasonal extreme heat.
Understanding how stronger El Niños reshape the climate can help countries close what the United Nations calls the global adaptation gap, which is the widening distance between known climate risks and actual preparation.
El Niño is the warm phase of a cyclical temperature shift in the tropical Pacific Ocean that can have immediate impacts, like the collapse of life-sustaining coastal fisheries and widespread coral reef die-offs, as well as impacts on land, including devastating flooding and extreme heatwaves.
The U.N. Environment Programme’s 2025 Adaptation Gap Report found that international public adaptation finance fell slightly to $26 billion in 2023, even as the cost of climate impacts rises sharply. Developing countries will need $310 billion to $365 billion per year by 2035 to prepare for worsening heat waves, floods, and droughts, but so far, global efforts will amount to less than a tenth of what’s needed.
The UNEP report warned that adaptation can no longer rely on reactive, incremental projects but must become anticipatory, strategic, and transformational: redesigning water systems, cities, agriculture, and infrastructure for the climate of the future, unlike anything people have experienced. Experts say adaptation doesn’t mean waiting for the old normal to return and that there is not a one-size-fits-all answer for building resilience to more intense climate impacts.
Kug said that El Niño and global warming may be locked into a vicious climate cycle. The study findings suggest global warming amplifies the impacts associated with super El Niños and “makes the climate system more prone to persistent shifts once those impacts are triggered.”
The practical challenge, Kug said, is not just preparing for a single season of extremes, but for a climate shift that will also alter conditions in the future.
“Super El Niño may not just cause a one-time extreme event,” he wrote. “It can shift the background climate conditions that people and ecosystems rely on.”
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.
Leave a Reply