From shifting weather patterns to rising humanitarian needs, discover what El Niño means for communities around the world.
Every few years, fishing communities along the coast of Peru would notice something strange around Christmas time. The usually cold, fish-rich waters off their shore would turn warm, and the fish would vanish. They called this recurring visitor El Niño, "the little boy," after the Christ child, because it tended to arrive around the holiday. What those communities were observing, without knowing it, was one of the most powerful natural forces shaping weather on Earth, and this year's event is forecast to become one of the strongest on record.
Ordinarily, strong trade winds blow from east to west across the tropical Pacific, pushing warm surface water toward Asia and Australia and allowing cold, nutrient-rich water to well up along the coast of South America. This is the ocean's normal rhythm, and it is what keeps Peruvian fisheries productive and Southeast Asian monsoons reliable. During El Niño, those trade winds weaken or even reverse. Without them holding the warm water back, it sloshes eastward across the Pacific and piles up off the coast of South America instead, sometimes raising sea surface temperatures there by more than a degree Celsius above average. That single shift is enough to reorganise rainfall and wind patterns across most of the planet, because the tropical Pacific acts as a kind of engine room for global weather. Where that engine sits warm or cool influences where the jet streams, the fast-moving rivers of air that steer storm systems, are positioned for the season (Smithsonian Ocean, 2023; NOAA National Weather Service, 2023).
Scientists track this by measuring sea surface temperatures in a patch of ocean called the Niño 3.4 region. When that patch stays at least 0.5°C warmer than average for several consecutive months, alongside the required atmospheric indicators, El Niño is officially declared. The opposite pattern, when the same patch turns unusually cold, is called La Niña, and the neutral in-between state is simply called ENSO-neutral. Together they make up the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, and the whole cycle repeats irregularly every two to seven years (NOAA Climate Prediction Center, 2026).
A new El Niño formed in the tropical Pacific this summer and has intensified rapidly since. As of NOAA's September 10 update, the El Niño Advisory remains in effect, and the event continues to strengthen: the weekly Niño 3.4 index reached +2.7°C in mid-August, up from a July monthly value of +2.03°C and a May–July seasonal average of +1.51°C, showing the warming has accelerated rather than levelled off (IRI Columbia, August 2026; NOAA CPC, September 2026). NOAA now puts the odds of a "very strong" event at greater than 90 percent for this autumn and winter, and gives a 69 percent chance that the October–December 2026 season exceeds every El Niño on record back to 1950 (NOAA CPC, 13 August 2026). El Niño is now considered effectively certain to persist through winter 2026–27, with the odds standing at 100 percent through January–March 2027 (StormBag, citing NOAA CPC, August 2026). Indonesia's national weather agency, BMKG, expects the event to persist into early 2027 and to peak at strong intensity, and humanitarian analysts have taken to calling it a possible "super" or "Godzilla" El Niño because of how fast it has developed (Tempo, July 2026; African Business, 2026). What makes this particular event more concerning than past ones is not just its strength. It is arriving on top of a global warming baseline of roughly 1.3°C, and in regions where conflict, debt and prior climate shocks have already worn down people's ability to absorb another one (FAO, June 2026).
The geography of El Niño's impacts overlaps with some of the world's largest Muslim populations, and the coming months look difficult for several of them.
Indonesia, home to the largest Muslim population on Earth, is already living through the sharpest edge of this event. As of September 7, fires in Indonesia had released an estimated 76 million tonnes of carbon for the year, putting 2026 on the same trajectory as 2015, when fires burned 2.6 million hectares of land across the country (Carbon Brief, September 2026). In the single week of September 1–7 alone, Copernicus satellite data recorded 19.7 million tonnes of CO₂ from Indonesian fires, more than a third of all global fire emissions measured that week, making Indonesia the world's single largest source of fire emissions for that period (Above the Norm News, September 2026). Indonesia's health ministry reports roughly 100,000 people sickened or injured by wildfire smoke so far this year, and officials say 2026 is already surpassing 2015 in fire activity at this equivalent point in the season, with September flagged as the critical peak month and months of fire season still to come (Scientific American, September 2026; CNN, 9 September 2026). The smoke threatens not only Indonesia's own air quality but that of Malaysia and Singapore downwind, through the transboundary haze that has repeatedly closed schools and grounded flights in past El Niño years (Free Malaysia Today, July 2026; Crisis24, June 2026).
Pakistan and Bangladesh face a harder version of the same pattern. El Niño can weaken the South Asian monsoon, the system that supplies much of the region's annual rainfall, by altering atmospheric circulation and the location of rising, rain-producing air. Pakistan's meteorological department is forecasting below-normal rainfall across most of the country for the 2026 monsoon, alongside more frequent and severe heatwaves, even as its northern mountains remain exposed to sudden glacier-melt flooding, a genuinely difficult combination of drought and flood risk in different parts of the same country (Pakistan Today, May 2026; Space4Climate Pakistan, June 2026). Bangladesh has already recorded a 36-day heatwave earlier this year and is now facing a suppressed monsoon on top of high fertiliser and energy costs, a combination the World Bank warns could push food further out of reach for poorer households even without an outright shortage (The Climate Watch, July 2026; Bangladesh Environment Network, 2026). The World Bank has separately warned that if this El Niño fully develops, rice yields could fall by a fifth to a half across the worst-hit parts of South Asia and East Africa, a staple that hundreds of millions of people depend on directly (Al Jazeera, July 2026).
Across the Horn of Africa, the picture splits in an unsettling way. Somalia and coastal Kenya are more likely to see excess rainfall and flooding, while much of the northern Horn, along with the Sahel further west, faces below-normal rains and drought. Aid agencies have flagged Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan together as among the countries most at risk this cycle, several of them already managing existing emergencies before this El Niño arrived (Al Jazeera, July 2026; Eurasia Review, July 2026). The UN's food security network expects assistance needs by November 2026 to be highest in Sudan, the DRC, Nigeria and Yemen, all countries already under severe strain, with needs also rising in Somalia, Mali and Lebanon (Welthungerhilfe, June 2026).
El Niño rarely produces a single type of disaster. It tends to produce several at once, in different places, which is part of why its overall toll is so large. Expect prolonged drought and water shortages in parts of the Sahel, southern Africa and Indonesia, alongside a heightened risk of wildfires in dry peat and forest regions. Expect the opposite in parts of East Africa and the western coast of South America, where the same shift in ocean temperature can bring heavier rain and flooding. Expect a weaker, less reliable monsoon across South Asia, which affects not just farmers but hydropower output in countries like Bhutan and drinking water storage in cities like Jakarta and Karachi. And expect this to show up in your grocery bill even if you live nowhere near the Pacific, since El Niño tends to reduce global yields of rice, maize and wheat, crops that together supply more than sixty percent of the world's calorie intake, while pushing up prices during years when many countries can least afford it (Crisis24, June 2026).
None of these effects is new to this particular El Niño. What is new is the backdrop. The 2015–16 El Niño alone affected more than sixty million people and triggered five billion dollars in humanitarian appeals across twenty-three countries (FAO, June 2026). The 2023–24 event that followed was among the five strongest ever recorded and caused an estimated $103.3 billion in damage, a figure originally reported by the World Meteorological Organization. (Planet2050, citing WMO, August 2026). It also coincided with exceptionally high global temperatures, including a 2024 annual average around 1.6°C above the 1850–1900 baseline (Raghuraman et al., Communications Earth & Environment, 2025). This year's event is developing rapidly and, according to current forecasts, could become exceptionally strong, against a backdrop of a warming planet and communities that have already experienced previous climate shocks. That compounding effect, rather than any single flood or drought, is the real reason to take it seriously.
Islam frames humanity's place on earth as a trust, not a possession. The Qur'an describes people as khalifah, stewards placed on the earth (Qur'an 6:165), and warns plainly that "corruption has appeared on land and sea because of what the hands of people have earned" (Qur'an 30:41), commanding moderation rather than excess in how we use what has been given to us (Qur'an 7:31). That trust asks Muslims to live with less waste and to take seriously our own part in environmental harm, however small it feels individually.
It also asks something more immediate: to act for the people caught in these disasters. The Prophet ﷺ said, "He is not a believer whose stomach is filled while his neighbour goes hungry" (Al-Adab Al-Mufrad 112), and taught that even the smallest act of charity has weight (Sahih al-Bukhari; Sahih Muslim). As drought and flood converge on some of the world's most vulnerable communities this year, this is exactly the moment that zakat, sadaqah and support for organisations, like Muslim Aid, working on the ground are intended to support.
We are a faith-based British international charity that provides help to people who are victims of natural disasters or conflict or suffering from poverty, hunger, disease, homelessness, injustice, deprivation or lack of skills and economic opportunities.
© Copyright 2026. Muslim Aid - Help Muslims Around the World in Need . All Rights Reserved.
Charity CIO No. 1176462
Serving humanity since 1985.
