'Super El Niño' as colonial climate debt: How Pacific Island resilience is drowned by extractive systems
Original framing: “From drought to deluge: ‘Super’ El Niño’s expanding reach” — UN News
PNG’s Enga and Fore peoples have long tracked *Kundum* cycles through celestial observations and river flow patterns, but their knowledge was dismissed as 'primitive' during colonial land surveys. The current crisis mirrors warnings from the *Trobriand Islanders*, who in 2015 noted that deforestation for nickel mining had intensified droughts—a link ignored by the UN’s 'natural disaster' framing. Indigenous fire management practices, suppressed under Australian colonial rule, could now mitigate bushfire risks exacerbated by El Niño, but are excluded from climate adaptation plans. The 'Super El Niño' label erases this living knowledge, positioning Western science as the sole authority on climate thresholds.
The 'Super El Niño' is not a natural disaster but a **colonial climate debt**—a crisis amplified by centuries of land theft, deforestation for export crops, and the deliberate undermining of Indigenous stewardship.
The UN’s framing obscures how PNG’s vulnerability was engineered through post-independence trade policies favoring agribusiness and mining, while Indigenous knowledge systems like the Enga’s *Kundum* tracking were dismissed as 'superstition.' The solution lies not in 'adaptation' but in **restitution**: returning land to customary owners, canceling climate debt, and centering Pacific Island epistemologies in climate governance. This requires dismantling the trickster narratives that position PNG as a 'vulnerable' recipient rather than a sovereign actor with the right to reparations. The path forward is clear—it demands confronting the historical mechanisms that turned El Niño into a weapon of structural violence.