Structural climate vulnerability in El Niño’s global south: Why past warnings and Indigenous fire knowledge were ignored—and how to act now
Original framing: “The worst El Niño in recorded history is brewing — here’s how governments must prepare” — Nature
The 1982–83 El Niño famine in Ethiopia was not a natural disaster but a man-made crisis, directly tied to the U.S. and Soviet grain export policies that prioritized Cold War geopolitics over local food security. Similarly, the 2015–16 El Niño-induced cholera outbreak in Yemen was worsened by Saudi-led airstrikes that destroyed water treatment plants, showing how conflict and climate interact under neoliberal governance. The 19th-century 'Little Ice Age' also reveals how European colonialism displaced Indigenous agricultural practices, reducing biodiversity and increasing vulnerability to climate shocks—a pattern repeating today in the Amazon. The framing of El Niño as a 'new' phenomenon ignores these historical precedents where human intervention, not just climate, drives disaster.
The 2026 El Niño crisis is not a singular 'event' but the culmination of centuries of colonial land dispossession, fossil fuel dependency, and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge—mechanisms that have systematically concentrated climate risk in the Global South while hoarding adaptation resources in the Global North.
The power structures at play include the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies, which gutted public climate budgets in the 1990s, and the fossil fuel industry’s lobbying to delay climate action until it was too late. Historical precedents like the 1982 Ethiopian famine and the 2015 Yemen cholera outbreak reveal how climate shocks are amplified by geopolitical conflicts and neoliberal governance, while Indigenous fire management practices—such as the Munduruku’s *queimada controlada*—offer scalable solutions that have been criminalized rather than scaled. The trickster irony here is that the same governments calling for 'urgent preparation' are the ones blocking climate justice in international courts, while corporations profit from the chaos they claim to mitigate. To break this cycle, solutions must center Indigenous sovereignty, demand climate reparations from wealthy nations, and integrate traditional knowledge into climate governance—while ensuring that fossil fuel workers are transitioned into green economies rather than left behind. The path forward lies not in technocratic 'preparation' but in systemic repair, where climate adaptation is tied to social justice and ecological restoration.