10 Aug 2026 El Niño and the fight over what it means

Meteorologists expect the El Niño now building in the Pacific Ocean to be the strongest on record, peaking between September and December. This recurring warming of surface ocean waters occurs irregularly every two to seven years, temporarily raising global temperatures and reshaping rainfall worldwide.

The UN World Food Programme estimates the El Niño on the horizon could push, at minimum, 49 million people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027 – across 45 countries already struggling to feed their populations, with the sharpest increases in Central America and southern Africa (WFP, 2026).

In South Asia, new research shows that global warming is strengthening the link between El Niño and drought in India. In Latin America, maize and bean harvests may fail in fragile parts of Nicaragua, and irrigated crops in Colombia and northeastern Brazil will most likely face water restrictions. This impacts food security further away as well; the EU imports close to 190 billion Euro of food a year from the regions most exposed. And in Europe directly, low river flows threaten hydropower and agriculture.

Those are the numbers. What concerns us at WACC just as much, however, is the story that will be told about the numbers – and how that story might affect action on climate change.

As much of the media coverage of the issue explains, El Niño is a natural cycle. However, scientists are clear that this year’s fires and heatwaves, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, are driven by fossil fuel emissions, not by El Niño, which only adds perhaps a tenth or two of a degree to a long-term warming trend.

This is creating fertile ground for disinformation campaigns seeking to deny or minimize climate change. Most advance the notion that the extreme weather events we are experiencing are a naturally occurring phenomenon and not caused by human activity.

This pattern is already visible. When Europe’s record heatwave arrived in June, social media filled with claims that the temperatures were nothing unusual, citing London heatwaves from the 1970s. After the 2024 floods in eastern Spain that killed more than 230 people, false claims spread that dams had been deliberately dismantled and that European river restoration rules caused the disaster, disinformation amplified by far-right Vox politicians.

Disinformation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but “a tactic” the powerful use to defend the status quo, notes Philip Newell of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) network. It appears however, that the tactic has shifted.

Outright denial has largely given way to attacks on climate policy itself, amplified by generative AI and spiking whenever a heatwave, flood, or drought makes the news – which is precisely when affected communities need trustworthy information the most.

This is precisely why democratic and people-centred communication and information ecosystems, especially at the local level, are vital climate stability infrastructures that protect us all, not an optional extra.

Our partners across the world show what that looks like. For example:

• Grupo COMUNICARTE has spent decades among the people in Colombia’s high-altitude Andean páramos ecosystem, weaving conservation into local recipes, elders’ stories, and mountain legends until protection became something communities owned rather than something imposed by the authorities.
• Nepal’s Indigenous Rights Foundation broadcasts dialogues between Indigenous communities, government officials, and hydropower developers, reaching roughly a million people and making decision-makers publicly accountable.
• In the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the Media Awareness and Justice Initiative helps communities collect their own environmental data, turning complaints dismissed as anecdotal into evidence-backed reports.

None of these interventions are fact-checking operations, which is how disinformation tends to be tackled. Rather, these initiatives do something that is both more difficult and more durable – they build trust, they treat farmers and elders as knowledge holders alongside scientists, and they keep local narratives at the centre.

Disinformation struggles in places where people already know whom to believe.

At the UN climate change conference COP30 last November, 12 governments signed a first-ever “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change,” promising what Brazil’s president, João Brant, called “a wave of truth.”

This is a welcome development. However, in most of the places El Niño will hit hardest, the key channels informing communities and fighting disinformation – community radio stations, Indigenous media networks, and local journalists – work on very little.

Funding, supporting, and protecting them is not charity nor is it optional. It is climate action.

Photo: Toa55/Shutterstock