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WMO Warns El Niño Could Hit “Exceptional” Strength, Raising Drought, Flood and Hunger Risks
The UN weather agency says the current El Niño is now near-certain to run into early 2027 and could become one of the strongest on record, with the sharpest pain expected in the world’s poorest farming regions. For St Vincent, the signal cuts two ways.
The World Meteorological Organization warned on Thursday that El Niño is intensifying toward exceptional strength and is now almost certain to persist into early 2027, raising the risk of drought, flooding and food insecurity across vulnerable regions. In its 3 September update, the agency put the chance that the event lasts through February 2027 at nearly 100 percent, the strongest level of certainty it has ever expressed in an El Niño or La Niña update.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo did not understate it. Speaking to reporters in Geneva, she said that if the present trajectory continues, the event may be stronger than anything since monitoring began, and so, in her words, literally off the charts used for the past four decades. She called it an exceptional El Niño that has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world, and said disruption from droughts and floods is already being felt.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it more bluntly still. El Niño, he said, is being supersized before our eyes, and the science leaves no room for doubt that the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.
What El Niño is doing
El Niño is a natural warming of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific that shifts winds, rainfall and storm tracks around the world. It is not caused by climate change, but human warming sits on top of it and can make the heat, drought and floods worse. This event is arriving strong and early. Sea surface temperatures in the key monitoring region climbed from about 1.5 degrees Celsius above normal between May and July, and WMO forecasts now expect the seasonal average anomaly to exceed roughly 2.9 degrees Celsius in the months ahead, with warm water stored below the surface helping to feed the event. The agency expects it to peak toward the end of this year and to leave higher global temperatures behind it in 2027.
That heat is why officials are comparing this event to the strongest on record. The powerful El Niño of 2023 to 2024 helped make 2024 the warmest year measured, and Saulo said no one should be surprised if that record falls again.
Where the pain is expected
The classic strong-El Niño pattern is already taking shape. WMO and partner agencies expect drier conditions and drought risk across parts of Southern Africa, Central America, northern South America and parts of Southeast Asia, alongside wetter conditions and flood risk in parts of eastern Africa, southern Brazil and the southern United States. Above-normal temperatures are forecast across almost all land areas from September through November.
The humanitarian stakes are concrete. The World Food Programme projects that this event could push at least 49 million more people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027, lifting the total from about 225 million to 274 million across the 45 vulnerable countries it studied, a rise of roughly 22 percent. Central America and southern Africa are expected to be hit hardest, with southern Africa still recovering from the 2023 to 2024 drought and Central America’s Dry Corridor already reporting heavy maize losses. By way of scale, WFP notes the 2015 to 2016 El Niño affected the food security of 60 to 100 million people.
There are knock-on effects beyond the harvest. During the last strong event, low water forced traffic limits on the Panama Canal, a chokepoint for Caribbean and Latin American trade, and a return of those conditions is among the risks agencies are watching this time.
El Niño is not a single storm. It is a months-long shift in the planet’s weather engine, and the poorest farming regions feel it first.
What it means for St Vincent
For St Vincent and the Grenadines, an El Niño year usually cuts two ways. It tends to suppress Atlantic hurricane activity by strengthening the high-altitude winds that tear storms apart, which can translate into a quieter storm season. That is the good news.
The harder side is water. El Niño tends to bring drier than normal conditions to the Eastern Caribbean, raising the risk of drought, strained reservoirs and pressure on farming that can stretch into 2027, since a poor rainy season shows up in the harvests that follow. For a country where water supply and agriculture are already exposed to the weather, that is the part of this forecast worth planning around now, not in the dry months when the reservoirs are already low.
The bottom line
WMO says it has launched what it calls an exceptional mobilisation with national weather services to push forecasts and early warnings, the largest such effort in its 50-year history. The message from Geneva is that the planet’s weather engine is running hotter than the charts used for the last 40 years, that 2026 is on track to sit among the hottest years measured with 2027 possibly hotter still, and that early action is far cheaper than late rescue. WFP puts it plainly: every dollar spent preparing can save several dollars in response.
VPN checks climate claims against the primary agencies, WMO, WFP and the UN, rather than secondhand summaries. Figures in this report reflect statements issued as of publication and will be updated as the event develops. Power to the People.