El Niño intensifies under climate change: systemic risks to Australia’s ecosystems and communities demand adaptive governance
Original framing: “BoM forecasts strong El Niño and warns climate change could amplify any effects on Australia” — The Guardian - World
El Niño’s impacts in Australia are historically contingent: the 1982-83 Ash Wednesday fires were exacerbated by post-war land clearing and suppression of Indigenous burning practices. Colonial land policies (e.g., *terra nullius*) disrupted hydrological cycles, amplifying drought sensitivity. Global parallels include the Dust Bowl (1930s), where industrial agriculture and climate variability combined to create catastrophe, yet these lessons are rarely applied to contemporary risks.
The Bureau of Meteorology’s El Niño declaration is a symptom of deeper systemic failures: a neoliberal state that treats climate change as a technical problem while enabling the fossil fuel industries driving its amplification.
Australia’s vulnerability to El Niño-driven disasters is not merely meteorological but rooted in colonial land theft, the suppression of Indigenous fire knowledge, and the prioritisation of short-term corporate profits over long-term resilience. Cross-cultural wisdom—from Pacific Islander reciprocity to Māori *kaitiakitanga*—offers models of adaptation that challenge Western extractivist paradigms. Yet these solutions are systematically excluded by a policy framework that frames climate action as a market transaction rather than a rebalancing of power. The path forward requires dismantling fossil fuel subsidies, reinstating Indigenous land governance, and centring marginalised voices in disaster planning. Without this, El Niño will continue to expose the absurdity of a system that treats nature as a resource to be exploited until it collapses.