UN warns of El Niño but wealthy nations owe climate reparations

By Sophie Naimi · Reporting from Paris · October 22, 2026

The UN warns of an unprecedented El Niño that threatens 50 million people with hunger, proving that wealthy nations' climate delay is a death sentence for the Global South.

The "behemoth" is coming, and the industrial North is once again treating the Global South as a sacrificial zone. We are told that the upcoming El Niño is a natural cycle, a mere roll of the planetary dice. This is a lie of omission. The physics of the Pacific Ocean are natural. Yet a planet scorched by fossil fuel emissions fuels the intensity of this event. Wealthy nations paid for this warming. Now they watch as the most vulnerable prepare for a wrecking ball they did not build.

The physics of a record-breaking heat

The numbers coming from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) are alarming and unprecedented. According to UN News, sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific may rise to 3.8℃ above average. To put this in perspective, the WMO triggers an El Niño alert at an anomaly of only 0.5℃ above normal.

Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the WMO, has been clear about the scale of this shift. She stated that the current event could be "literally, off the monitoring charts" used for past decades. Saulo noted that record El Niños have seen anomalies of 3℃ before. We are now "beyond that limit."

As CBC reports, this is where the "natural cycle" argument collapses. Global warming increases the intensity of El Niños because the baseline temperature is already higher. We are seeing a weather pattern supercharged by a century of carbon greed.

The human cost of climate delay

For the Global North, a "Super El Niño" might mean a few blockbuster snowstorms. FOX Weather notes that past events brought heavy snow to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Central Park received over two feet of snow in January 2016. For the rest of the world, this is about survival, not snow.

Tom Fletcher, the UN's under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, describes this El Niño as a "wrecking ball." He warns it will tear through Latin America, Asia, and Africa with extreme heat, droughts, and floods. The human toll is staggering. Fletcher states that some 50 million people could face increased hunger.

The financial burden falls on those who can least afford it. The African Development Bank estimates that El Niño will cost African countries between $10 and $20 billion.

The tragedy is compounded by a world in chaos. Euronews reports that supply chain crunches in the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz strain humanitarian systems. Fletcher has released $50 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund for countries including Somalia and South Sudan. A few million dollars is a bandage on a gaping wound.

A history of predicted disasters

We have seen this movie before. This is the same mechanism we saw during the 1997-1998 El Niño. That event was one of the most powerful on record, causing widespread droughts and flooding across the globe. It amplified humanitarian crises and caused global economic losses of US$5.7 trillion within five years.

The pattern is a long record of failure. The 2015-2016 El Niño demonstrated how warmer ocean temperatures amplify humanitarian crises.

The most capable defenders of the status quo will argue that we cannot stop a natural cycle. They will say that spending billions on "resilience" is a gamble against nature. This is the logic of the arsonist offering to sell the victim a fire extinguisher. We cannot stop the Pacific from warming, but we can stop the hunger that follows.

The failure is not in the science; the science is precise. The failure is in the will of international financial institutions to move money before disaster hits. Tom Fletcher rightly called it an "extraordinary failure" to see this crisis coming and squander the chance to protect people.

The 3.8℃ anomaly is a siren. If wealthy nations provide crumbs while the Global South burns and floods, they commit a crime. We must stop treating El Niño's humanitarian fallout as an act of God. Instead, we must treat it as a debt owed by the North. Until adaptation funds are treated as reparations rather than charity, the "behemoth" will feast on the poor.

UN warns of El Niño but wealthy nations owe climate reparations

The physics of a record-breaking heat

The human cost of climate delay

A history of predicted disasters

Sources