The global impact of the upcoming “super El Niño” weather event is stark: latest estimates suggest more than 450,000 people will die, overwhelmingly in the global south, as a direct result of heatwaves. Extreme weather linked to the climate phenomenon, such as wildfires and flooding, is expected to take yet more lives.
While the UK will be spared the most direct and deadly effects of El Niño, it will feel the global ripple effects of its devastating impact.
The precise effect of El Niño on UK weather is “notoriously tricky to predict” because, while the phenomenon develops over the eastern Pacific, weather patterns in northern Europe “are strongly affected by weather phenomena in the North Atlantic”, said Madeleine Cuff in New Scientist.
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An El Niño of average strength usually means a “wetter, windier, stormier” autumn and early winter followed by a late-winter cold snap. However, the “sheer size” of the developing super El Niño could mean that those wet and wild autumn conditions extend throughout the winter and even into the spring, according to Adam Scaife, who leads long-range forecasting at the Met Office.
Prolonged rainfall could help “replenish reservoirs and groundwater after an exceptionally dry summer”, said Cuff, but it comes at the price of elevated flood risk.
Perhaps easier to predict are the knock-on economic repercussions for UK consumers as a result of the disruption to global agriculture production and supply chains “already marred by the inflationary impact of the Iran war”, said The Times.
The cocoa market has been volatile in recent years, but hopes of calmer future prices are starting to reverse as investors brace for El Niño-related drought conditions in the crop’s West Africa heartlands. Prices of robusta, one of the world’s major coffee beans, are similarly soaring amid expected “pressure on reservoirs in Vietnam and weak irrigation in Indonesia”. European wheat production is more “resilient” to the effects of El Niño, but exports continue to be affected by “escalating attacks by Russia and Ukraine on each other’s Black Sea ports”.
As a result, British consumers can expect higher prices on supermarket shelves as manufacturers pass on those increases, which come in addition to higher transportation costs linked to fuel supply disruptions in the Middle East. It is, according to climate and commodities expert Hamad Hussain, “a perfect storm” for agricultural commodity markets.
What next?
It is now “beyond doubt” that the strength of the El Niño phenomenon has been supercharged by “human-made folly and injustice”, said The Guardian. The immediate priority must be to ensure support for the developing countries who have “contributed the least to the climate crisis but are likely to suffer most”. But more broadly, the “extraordinary toll” expected from this year’s El Niño must act as a “spur to action” for world leaders to change course. For the UK, that means “accelerating efforts to prepare the UK for increasingly extreme weather”. It is evident “we cannot afford not to do so”.
