It's official: 2026 is an El Niño year

**Will Bain** (0:03)
It's official, 2026 will be a year of El Nino.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
But right now, it's checking all the boxes for it evolving into being one of the historically strong events.

**Will Bain** (0:14)
This Australian farmer says the industry is battening down the hatches.

**Neil Watson** (0:18)
What El Nino will do, a lot of people down sell their herds, and some people have either de-stocked totally, or reduced at least half their cows.

**Will Bain** (0:27)
This is World Business Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Will Bain. Also on the programme today, we'll hear from businesses in one of the World Cup host cities as the tournament officially gets underway.
Yes, El Nino has officially begun. That's according to scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who say sea surface temperatures having risen sharply in the tropical Pacific in recent months and have passed 0.5 degrees Celsius above average threshold that they used to define an El Nino event. Many forecasts suggest this could end up as a so-called super El Nino and even be among the strongest ever recorded. We'll discuss the possible economic consequences of that in just a moment, but let's hear from two business owners who've suffered from El Nino related weather events in the past. Here's Neil Watson, a cattle farmer in Australia.

**Neil Watson** (1:31)
What El Nino will do, a lot of people downsell their herds and some people have either de-stocked totally or reduced at least half their cows. So someone that might have been running 1,000 breeders might be back to 400 or 500 cows.
So those cattle are gone. They will not be in the numbers for breeders next year. Therefore, there won't be a weaner calf available next year from those cows. So there'll be a shortage in supply.

**Will Bain** (2:00)
And Andrew Malarkey is a chef and the owner of Wild Char Gow, a restaurant on a holiday island in the Philippines. He works closely with the island's farmers, sourcing locally farmed fruit and veg.

**Andrew Malarkey** (2:11)
The reality is the climate uncertainty is becoming the new normal. We've had to become more adaptable. Practical examples such as expanding our sourcing, preserving ingredients, pickling, drying and other techniques. You know, we need to design seasonal menus. Again, working closely with our producers and our farmers.

**Will Bain** (2:29)
So that's a bit of a snapshot of El Nino's past. Perhaps we'll do a bit of projecting forward now with Justin Mankin, Associate Professor at Dartmouth College in the United States and expert in the economic consequences of climate change. Justin, thanks for being with us on the programme.

**Justin Mankin** (2:44)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

**Will Bain** (2:46)
A super El Nino compared to an El Nino. I know perhaps it almost in the language sounds a little flippant, but what is the difference?

**Justin Mankin** (2:54)
The difference, I mean, El Nino comes in a lot of different flavours and the spatial pattern of what we're talking about here, kind of sea surface temperature anomalies, meaning how much warmer than average temperatures are in the tropical Pacific, which totally reconfigures weather and climate around the world. A super El Nino is just an El Nino that tends to be stronger, so something well over two degrees in terms of a temperature anomaly. I think the spatial pattern of those temperatures are really going to matter for how sizeable the impacts are in Australia versus in Peru.

**Will Bain** (3:33)
I was going to say, do us the sweep of where of, I mean, we heard from a couple of our case studies there, didn't we, of people who have been affected in the past, but where in the world geographically have been some of the most impacted parts of the world?

**Justin Mankin** (3:47)
Yeah.
Different countries reside in different places on earth and their weather and climate is tied differently to El Nino as a phenomenon.
The geography decides what the hazards are and what the impacts are. When we're talking about the hazards, they look a lot like global warming more generally, right? Heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires. El Nino is shifting where those extremes manifest, whether it's drought across parts of Southeast Asia and Australia and places like Southern Africa or whether or not it's flooding and landslides in Peru and Ecuador and places in East Africa. I think a general expectation is that an El Nino year is just a warmer year. It is non-trivial in terms of likelihood that 2026 is going to be among the top two or three warmest years on record. And 2027 is nearly guaranteed to be the warmest year on record. And it's no coincidence that the last warmest year on record was associated with the previous El Nino, the 2023-2024 event.