The climate crisis is already reshaping the risks that communities across Asia and the Pacific live with. Now another warning signal demands urgent attention. On 3 September 2026, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that El Niño is firmly established and will intensify into a very strong event, raising the risks of floods, drought and extreme heat well into 2027. WMO puts the likelihood that it persists through February 2027 at nearly 100 %, the most unequivocal forecast it has ever issued.

El Niño is a natural climate pattern, and it typically returns every two to seven years and lasts nine to twelve months. The region has lived through powerful events in recent memory: the 2023–2024 El Niño, ranked by WMO among the five strongest on record, and the even stronger 2015–2016 event. But El Niño now unfolds on a warmer planet, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects, with medium confidence, that extreme El Niño events will occur about twice as often this century as in the last.

The worst impacts may still be ahead

El Niño is expected to peak towards the end of 2026, but for much of the region the most serious consequences may come later. A UN regional snapshot warns that the gravest agricultural and food-security impacts may not emerge until late 2026 and 2027. In mainland Southeast Asia, impacts have historically been most pronounced around February to May of the second year of an episode. Drier conditions, water stress, crop losses, wildfires and extreme heat could persist or intensify even as El Niño itself weakens. 

A region already under strain

What makes this moment so serious is what El Niño is arriving on top of. On 26 August, a massive flash flood and debris flow originating high in the Himalaya devastated communities along Nepal’s Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers. In late September, torrential rain flooded Bangkok, and Typhoon Dujuan brought record-breaking rainfall, floods and landslides to the greater Tokyo area. None of these disasters has been directly attributed to El Niño, but together they show how thin the margins already are.

In Nepal, UNDP’s rapid post-disaster assessment found that significant part of population in the affected municipalities already lived with above-average vulnerability before the flood. That is the core lesson: disasters strike hardest where development has left people exposed. And the next disaster does not wait for recovery from the last one to finish.

Nor will the impacts be equal. A smallholder farmer who loses a harvest may lose the income needed for the next season; an outdoor worker may lose a day’s wages to extreme heat; a family without savings, insurance or social protection may have little to fall back on. These pressures are compounded by elevated fuel, fertilizer and food prices, which could turn climate-related crop losses into higher food insecurity through 2027.

What must be done now

Unlike an earthquake, El Niño gives us warning. The months before the peak of its impacts are the most valuable time to act, and that window is closing. UNDP sees several priorities for governments and partners now.

First, turn forecasts into decisions. Governments, national meteorological services and partners need a shared, regularly updated picture of risk, translated into clear messages that reach those most exposed, including women and remote communities, through channels they trust. 

Second, make anticipatory action ready: review triggers, contingency plans, pre-arranged financing and supply arrangements. 

Third, prepare social protection systems to scale up quickly, with registries, payment channels and targeting in place before households are forced into harmful coping strategies.

Fourth, adapt what is already under way: ongoing development programmes can be adjusted now to reduce drought, heat, flood and market-shock impacts. 

And fifth, prepare for recovery before it is needed, by agreeing on assessment arrangements, baseline data, coordination roles and financing pathways, so that recovery can start quickly and build back safer.

Beyond this El Niño: investing in resilience for the long term

The 2026–2027 El Niño should also be a reminder of something larger. El Niño is one phase of a recurring cycle. It will return, as will La Niña, on a planet that keeps warming. If we treat each event as a one-off emergency, we will keep paying for the same losses again and again.

How severely a community experiences an El Niño is decided years in advance, by where roads and settlements are built, how water is managed, who is covered by social protection and whether public budgets have room to absorb a shock. UNDP’s approach is therefore to treat El Niño not as a humanitarian exception, but as core development business: one continuous cycle of monitoring, preparedness, response and recovery, anchored in national development planning and budgets.

That means going beyond reducing today’s risks to avoid creating tomorrow’s. It means integrating climate and disaster risk into development plans, public investment and infrastructure standards; strengthening the institutions that keep water, health, education and local services running under stress; expanding shock-responsive social protection; and building layered risk-financing arrangements, from contingency budgets and contingent credit to insurance, so that money flows before losses mount rather than after. It also means putting the most vulnerable people at the centre of these decisions and investing in the data and early warning systems that make them possible.

The cost of acting early is a fraction of the cost of recovering late. Every El Niño tests the resilience we have built; this one should also drive us to build more.

We still have time to prepare, but that time is running short. What we do now, and what we invest in for the years ahead, will determine how well communities, economies and development gains withstand the shocks to come.