A Super El Niño is coming — guess who pays

Let us put the coming Super El Niño in terms closer to home than sea surface temperature anomalies.

In 2024, El Niño — not even a Super one — destroyed PHP 15.3 billion worth of Philippine crops, dried out 270,855 hectares, and wrecked the livelihoods of over 333,000 farmers and fisherfolk. The Department of Agriculture called it one of the biggest single-year losses on record. Now the European modeling suite projects ocean temperatures more than 2 degrees Celsius above average — the Super El Niño threshold. If that materializes by late 2026 or into 2027, the Global South absorbs the heaviest blows from a climate event it did almost nothing to cause.

This is the part that gets buried under the meteorology. The weather maps are global, but the damage is not. Drought carves through southern Africa, South America and Southeast Asia — regions where agriculture anchors GDP, irrigation is thin, and governments have no fiscal cushion. The U.S. and Europe treat El Niño mostly as a storm-season inconvenience.

A 2023 Science study by Dartmouth researchers quantified the disparity. The 1982–83 and 1997–98 Super El Niños drained USD 4.1 trillion and USD 5.7 trillion from the global economy, with losses persisting at least five years. The hardest-hit were lower-income tropical nations with the smallest carbon footprints. The researchers project USD 84 trillion in El Niño-related losses this century under current warming.

The safety net meant to help is failing. The UNEP’s 2025 Adaptation Gap Report found developing countries need USD 310 billion per year in climate adaptation finance through 2035. They receive USD 26 billion — a twelfth of what is needed. That figure actually fell from 2022 to 2023.

Wealthy nations are not immune. Global insurers paid out over USD 137 billion in weather catastrophe claims in 2024, well above the 10-year average. In California, State Farm and Allstate stopped writing new homeowner policies. The state’s insurer of last resort tripled its policyholder count to 610,000 by mid-2025, then needed a USD 1 billion bailout after the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned that within a decade, some U.S. regions could become unmortgageable.

A Super El Niño accelerates all of this — more drought, more wildfire, more storms, possibly 2026 or 2027 as the warmest years on record.

The honest position is not panic. It is treating El Niño as an economic event demanding pre-positioned resources. Rich nations must close the adaptation finance gap as an obligation proportional to emissions. Insurance markets must price risk transparently and reward mitigation — Colorado’s 2025 law requiring that has inspired similar bills in 18 states.

Countries like the Philippines need drought-tolerant crops, expanded irrigation, and actual crop insurance before the dry season. The Philippine Crop Insurance Corporation covered only 56,112 of the 333,000 farmers affected in 2024.

We can see the warm water spreading east across the Pacific right now. The question is whether we look at the forecast, nod, and do nothing anyway.