The climate pattern putting millions at risk: El Niño explained

This article is published in association with United Nations.

El Niño is putting millions of lives at risk in eastern and southern Africa but the UN is ensuring that communities are better prepared to deal with its impact.

The story from a human perspective

A farmer in Zambia who hasn’t seen a maize harvest. 

A mother in Somalia carrying her sick children through floodwater. 

A baby in Malawi, crying because she’s starving.

These aren’t isolated stories. They’re what happens when El Niño arrives.

El Niño made simple

El Niño is a natural climate pattern, a periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean that shifts weather around the world. 

It’s not new, and it’s not caused by climate change, although climate change can worsen its impact. 

Forecasters expect El Niño to intensify in coming months and to possibly stretch into early 2027.

For millions of people in southern and eastern Africa, that’s not a weather forecast. It’s a stark warning.

Where the threat lands and how

El Niño doesn’t hit everywhere the same way.

In eastern Africa, from Somali to Tanzania, it tends to mean too much rain. Flash floods, rivers bursting their banks, landslides, homes underwater, roads washed out, clinics and schools cut off.

In southern Africa, from Zambia to South Africa and from Namibia to Mozambique, it usually means the opposite; not enough rain which means crops failing, water sources drying up, and pastures disappearing.

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Different weather, but the same outcome; the most vulnerable people lose the safety nets that keep them alive.

Esnart Chongani is a farmer in Zambia. She said the 2024 drought meant her family harvested no maize at all.

 “I cannot remember anything like this,” she said. People are so hungry. The generosity of our community has disappeared because everyone is struggling.” 

Martha Kalumbi in Malawi, whose baby was hospitalised for malnutrition said a failed harvest left her family and everyone around her, with nothing.

“My child was always crying. Doctors told me she was starving and getting malnourished,” she said. “I was afraid that my baby might die. The situation was painful.”

And it’s not just hunger. Floods contaminate water supplies, which fuels outbreaks of cholera and other waterborne disease. 

Standing water breeds mosquitoes, driving up malaria. 

People lose homes and get displaced, sometimes for good. 

In Somalia, a mother of nine named Asha Mohamed was pushed from her home by the 2023 floods.

“Life became challenging after the floods,” she said. “My children fell sick, and I had no money to buy medicine or take them to a proper health facility.” 

How the UN is getting ahead of El Niño

The good news: El Niño can be forecast months in advance. That gives humanitarian agencies a rare head start, and they’re using it.

• Moving money before the crisis, not after. Between 2023 and 2025, early “anticipatory action” funding reached over three million people across southern Africa and 5.5 million across eastern Africa; cash and support delivered before disaster struck, not during it.
• Getting farmers ready to survive a bad season. In Madagascar, families who received cash transfers and drought-resistant seeds ahead of time ate noticeably better than those who didn’t.
• Building better early-warning systems. In Zambia, the Government and international partners are investing in stronger weather-monitoring infrastructure to catch risks sooner.
• Launching a joint appeal to protect the most exposed. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) are aiming to reach 8.8 million people across 22 high-risk countries with cash aid, flood- and drought-resistant farming support, and livestock protection.

As UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher put it: “The choice is clear: we can wait for disaster, or we can invest in resilience.”

For communities that have already lived through this once, that head start could make all the difference.