Record El Niño threatens flooding across East Africa and Asia

A fast-strengthening El Niño system could unleash a damaging mix of floods, drought and disease across vulnerable communities in East Africa and Asia, the International Rescue Committee has warned.

In an alert issued on Monday, the humanitarian group identified Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan as among the countries facing the greatest danger. Several are already coping with protracted humanitarian crises.

“We’re watching several emergencies converge at once, and the places least equipped to absorb another shock are the ones in the crosshairs,” Bob Kitchen, a senior official for emergencies at the IRC, said.

On July 9, the US Climate Prediction Center said El Niño was rapidly gaining strength. It put the chance of the event becoming one of the strongest recorded since 1950 at 81 percent, with a peak expected from October to December.

The World Meteorological Organization, the UN weather agency, said in early July that El Niño conditions were already in place and likely to intensify quickly between July and September.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist, said on his YouTube channel that equatorial Pacific ocean temperatures had reached record levels for this stage of the year. He described the development as “an enormous story of huge consequence for the world”.

For many communities expected to feel El Niño’s effects, the threat comes after drought, conflict and reduced aid funding have already depleted their ability to withstand another crisis.

El Niño is a naturally occurring change in Pacific Ocean temperatures that returns every two to seven years. It develops as trade winds that usually drive warm water west weaken, allowing warmer water to spread back across the ocean.

Its consequences are felt far beyond the Pacific, delivering intense rain in some places and suppressing rainfall in others. East Africa usually experiences a drier middle of the year followed by wetter conditions from October through December, a pattern forecasters say could be amplified this year by a connected Indian Ocean warming cycle.

Somalia has already seen repeated heavy-rain flooding in parts of Mogadishu this year.

FEWS NET, the US-funded early warning network, has said southern Somalia faces a credible famine risk if floods later this year resemble those of 1997 or 2023. During those El Niño-Indian Ocean events, farmland was inundated and hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes.

Kenya’s weather service has said there is an 80-82 percent probability that El Niño will continue through the year. After a drier midyear, authorities have activated the national disaster plan in preparation for heavier rains between October and December.

In Bangladesh, landslides and floods in the Cox’s Bazar camps have killed at least 15 Rohingya refugees and displaced more than 10,000 people since early July.

Pakistan confronts a similarly divided forecast: rainfall is expected to remain below average across wider areas, while northern mountain regions face the prospect of sudden floods caused by glacier melt.

The World Bank has warned that a fully developed El Niño could cut rice production by between a fifth and a half in the worst-hit areas of South Asia and East Africa, where the crop is central to food security for hundreds of millions.

That decline could deepen shortages and raise affordability concerns, particularly as the US-Israel war on Iran and Tehran’s retaliatory strikes appear to be escalating again around the Strait of Hormuz, a vital route for global energy and fertiliser supplies.

Fertiliser prices have already risen sharply this year.

The International Rescue Committee and other aid organisations are calling on donors to finance preventive action immediately, rather than responding only after disaster has struck.

By Faisal Ali Tuesday July 14, 2026