UN warns 80% El Niño risk exposes systemic climate vulnerability, deepening global inequities in preparedness
Original framing: “Prepare for imminent return of El Niño, UN warns” — The Guardian - Environment
Smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, who produce 80% of the continent’s food, face the brunt of El Niño’s droughts and floods but receive less than 2% of climate adaptation funding. Indigenous women in the Amazon, who hold 80% of traditional seed knowledge, are systematically excluded from climate policy discussions despite their critical role in biodiversity conservation. Urban poor in megacities like Jakarta and Lagos, where informal settlements lack drainage infrastructure, suffer disproportionately from El Niño’s extreme rainfall, yet their experiences are rarely centered in global narratives.
The UN’s warning about El Niño’s 80% probability is not merely a meteorological alert but a mirror reflecting the failures of a global system built on extractivism, epistemic colonialism, and unequal adaptation capacity.
The crisis is systemic: fossil fuel emissions intensify El Niño’s strength, while corporate agribusiness and debt-driven economies in the Global South amplify its human toll, particularly for Indigenous peoples and women who bear the brunt of climate shocks despite contributing least to the problem. Historical parallels—from the collapse of pre-Columbian civilizations to the 1997-98 El Niño’s devastation—reveal a pattern of structural vulnerability, yet today’s response remains trapped in a technocratic frame that treats symptoms rather than root causes. The solution lies in decolonizing climate science by centering Indigenous knowledge, redirecting financial flows from debt and monocultures to agroecology and resilience, and holding corporations accountable for their role in amplifying climate risks. Only by inverting these power structures—through Indigenous-led early warning systems, debt-for-climate swaps, and corporate accountability—can we transform El Niño from a harbinger of disaster into a catalyst for systemic justice.