UN agencies appeal for help to protect weakest from unprecedented El Niño

Two UN agencies issued a powerful appeal on Wednesday for immediate assistance to help communities already being impacted by the strongest El Niño weather pattern on record.“The current El Niño event could be unprecedented in strength – literally, off the monitoring charts that we have used for the past four decades – and will peak towards the end of 2026, but its impacts will be felt long after that,” said Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).According to the latest Global Seasonal Climate Update from WMO, sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific – the epicentre of the extreme El Niño weather phenomenon – may rise to 3.8℃ above average between November 2026 and January 2027.While a Pacific Ocean surface temperature anomaly of 0.5℃ above normal is enough to trigger an El Niño alert by WMO, Ms. Saulo highlighted concerns that the impact of an El Niño fuelled by a 3.8℃ gap has no precedent. Simply unprecedentedPrevious El Niños linked to anomalies of 3℃ have brought “very substantive impacts across the world”, but “we are beyond that limit, out of our records, out of our statistics of what we can expect”, the agency chief stressed.“W...