What the UK's Own El Niño Funding Reveals About Who's Actually at Risk

"El Niño is being supersized before our eyes," UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned this month. "The science leaves no room for doubt, the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up." Days later, UK Environment Secretary Angela Eagle told the Guardian that households should keep an emergency store of food, warning that Britain is "about to experience probably the largest El Niño that has ever been seen." Her comments landed the same week as a National Audit Office report, which rated Defra's ability to manage food supply shocks as merely "amber."

The advice itself isn't new. The UK has run a "Prepare" campaign for several years, built originally around pandemics, cyberattacks and terrorism, advising households to keep three days of food, water and a battery radio. What's new is a weather forecast being placed in that same category, with officials reaching for language usually reserved for security threats, i.e. "supersized," "unprecedented," possibly the biggest El Niño in several centuries.

But the UK government's own next move is more telling than the stockpiling advice. Days after Eagle's comments, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office announced up to £15 million in new funding for anticipatory action in the countries it considers most at risk from this El Niño, not the UK, but drought prone parts of southern Africa and Southeast Asia, flood affected regions of East Africa and South America, and vulnerable communities across Latin America.

The two announcements together reveal more than the headline does. While the government is dealing with what looks like a difficult winter at home, it is also quietly preparing for the possibility of much worse conditions elsewhere.

Why Is This El Niño Different?

El Niño is a natural warming of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean that recurs every two to seven years, shifting rainfall and temperature patterns worldwide as it releases ocean heat into the atmosphere. What's developing in 2026 is not typical. The World Meteorological Organization's own seasonal forecasts put the anomaly in the key Niño 3.4 region at roughly 3.6°C by September-November, well above the 2°C threshold usually considered a major event. Reuters has reported that the event carries an 81% chance of becoming "very strong," with sea surface temperatures at their warmest levels since at least 1982 and potentially making it the strongest such event since 1950.

"We should be clear that this is an unprecedented event," said Professor Adam Scaife, the Met Office's head of long-range forecasting. "I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts." Because El Niño releases stored ocean heat into the atmosphere, it typically pushes global temperatures higher the year after it peaks. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of Berkeley Earth told NPR that "it is likely that 2027 will be the warmest year on record" as a result.

Where Is The £15 Million Actually Going?

The FCDO's funding announcement maps onto specific, well documented risks. In South Asia, India's southwest monsoon, which supplies roughly 70% of the country's annual rainfall, opened the 2026 season badly behind schedule. By the end of June, the country had recorded a 40% rainfall deficit against the seasonal average, according to India's Meteorological Department, threatening rice, pulses and oilseed crops that underpin food prices for 1.4 billion people.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) reports that Central America and southern Africa are expected to be hit hardest of all, with food insecure populations projected to rise by around 83% in Central America and nearly 75% in southern Africa.

Elsewhere, Australia's Department of Agriculture has forecast below-average rainfall across most of the country through the southern hemisphere winter and spring as El Niño strengthens. In the Americas, the same event is expected to work the other way. The NOAA notes that El Niño typically increases wind shear across the Atlantic, suppressing hurricane formation, a rare case of the phenomenon lowering one kind of risk even as it raises others nearby. The UK itself, by contrast, faces a wetter, stormier autumn and early winter: a disruptive impact, but still the mildest outcome on this list.

Add it up, and the WFP analysis of 45 already food-insecure countries projects that this El Niño could push nearly 49 million more people into acute hunger by the end of 2027, lifting the total from around 225 million to 274 million, an increase of roughly 22%.

As a point of comparison, the WFP notes that the 2015-16 El Niño, the last event of comparable size, affected the food security of 60 to 100 million people over its course, and this one is forecast to be stronger still. "El Niño is a massive threat to the food security of millions who are already vulnerable," said Carl Skau, the WFP's acting executive director, in the same report. The agency has already triggered anticipatory action plans in South Sudan, Chad, Mauritania and Uganda, pre-positioning cash assistance ahead of expected shocks.

The Gap Even The UK's Own Funding Admits

The FCDO's own justification for its £15 million doubles as a warning about how poorly the world manages this kind of risk generally. Research compiled for the humanitarian sector suggests that around a third of humanitarian shocks can be predicted well in advance, yet historically only a small fraction of a percent of global humanitarian funding has gone toward acting on those predictions before disaster strikes. In other words, the UK government's own case for this funding is that most of the world still isn't set up to prepare for a risk it can already see coming, a gap that £15 million narrows only slightly.

Coverage of that gap doesn't track its scale either, and this isn't a uniquely British pattern. A peer-reviewed study in The Geographical Journal compared newspaper coverage across the Global North of Hurricane Harvey in the US with coverage of the South Asian monsoon floods that struck the same year, and found the Global North disaster received far more articles, longer coverage and a longer run, framed around shared cultural and economic ties, versus a Global South disaster framed around difference.

The consequences show up in funding too. Reporting from The New Humanitarian found the UN's 2026 global appeals had received only around a quarter of what was requested, leaving responses in some of the countries most exposed to this El Niño chronically under resourced before the event even peaks.

None of this is new, either. The Paris Agreement already obliges wealthier nations to help vulnerable countries build resilience against exactly this kind of shock. And yet last year’s UNEP Adaptation Gap Report found that international public adaptation finance to developing countries actually fell, from $28 billion in 2022 to $26 billion in 2023, against an estimated need of $310-365 billion a year by 2035.

For years, communities across South Asia, East Africa and Central America have faced El Niño's swings with too little funding and too little preparation. Climate change is only making those swings more severe.

What Should Membership Bodies Take From This?

For associations with members across several of these regions, the practical takeaway is that resilience planning needs to extend wherever exposure exists, using the same evidence the UK's own funding decisions are already built on, rather than only the version of the story that leads the domestic news. Commodity exposure is real too: disruption to Indian rice and pulses, or to African and Central American agricultural output, moves global prices that members everywhere ultimately depend on.

Being able to hold a clear, evidence-based view of an event like this, across every region it touches rather than the one closest to home, is exactly the kind of confidence membership professionals need when advising their boards and members on environmental and climate risk.

Call to Action.

Membership bodies are well placed to help their members see past domestic headlines and prepare for risks that don't stop at national borders. CAFA supports membership organisations with resources and sector-specific guidance that help translate global climate risks into practical action, wherever their members are based. Join here to access our free resources.