What is the Impact of El Niño on People and Wildlife?

El Niño reshapes weather patterns across the globe, triggering cascading effects that touch marine ecosystems, terrestrial wildlife, agriculture, human health, and national economies. The warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation cycle shifts rainfall belts, heats ocean surfaces, and suppresses the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water along tropical coastlines. The consequences range from mass coral bleaching and seabird die-offs to crop failures, disease outbreaks, and economic losses measured in the trillions of dollars. The severity depends on the strength of the event, but even moderate episodes leave a measurable mark.

How El Niño Disrupts the Ocean’s Food Web

Under normal conditions, trade winds push warm surface water westward across the tropical Pacific, allowing cold, nutrient-laden water to rise along the coast of South America. During El Niño, those winds weaken or reverse, and a thick layer of warm water spreads eastward. Off Peru, the physical machinery of upwelling may keep running, but the warm water pooled at the surface means only nutrient-poor water gets drawn up. During the powerful 1982–83 event, upwelling at some locations ceased entirely despite continued strong winds, because shifts in ocean pressure drove surface water onshore and canceled out the wind-driven flow that normally pulls it offshore.¹

The practical result is a crash in phytoplankton, the microscopic algae at the base of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton productivity in the equatorial Pacific drops sharply during El Niño events.² During the 1991–92 El Niño, primary productivity along the equator fell to roughly half the levels measured once cooler conditions returned months later.³ That collapse ripples upward through every trophic level: less phytoplankton means less zooplankton, fewer small fish, and less food for seabirds, marine mammals, and commercial fisheries.

Mass Mortality in Galápagos Marine Wildlife

The Galápagos Islands sit right in the path of El Niño’s warmest waters, and the wildlife there has become a stark barometer of how severe an event is. The 1982–83 El Niño, the strongest of that century, devastated the islands’ endemic species. Galápagos fur seals lost the four youngest year classes almost entirely, along with roughly 30 percent of adult females and non-territorial males. Mortality among large territorial males approached 100 percent.⁴ Sea lions experienced similarly devastating pup losses.

Seabirds fared no better. Most species stopped breeding altogether during that event, and many abandoned the archipelago. Blue-footed boobies gave up every nesting attempt. Galápagos penguins declined by 77 percent, and flightless cormorants by 49 percent.⁵ Population monitoring of the Galápagos penguin shows that the species dropped precipitously after 1982–83 and has recovered only very slowly since, with body condition tracking sea surface temperature closely: penguins gain weight during cool La Niña conditions and starve during warm El Niño phases.⁶ For small, isolated populations like these, each strong El Niño is an existential threat, because recovery takes years or decades and can be interrupted by the next event.

Coral Bleaching Around the Tropics

Warm water does not just starve cold-water species. It also pushes tropical coral reefs past their thermal limits. El Niño-related warming drives increases in coral bleaching globally, with some locations losing all their living coral cover during a single event. Across studies, the maximum reduction in local reef cover reached 100 percent for individual taxa, and community-wide losses hit as high as about 80 percent.⁷

What makes recent events particularly alarming is that reefs once considered naturally heat-tolerant are now bleaching. The 2015–16 El Niño triggered the third documented global mass bleaching event. In northwestern Australia’s Kimberley region, corals that thrive in naturally extreme, thermally variable environments bleached at rates of roughly 57 to 81 percent, marking the first El Niño-related regional mass bleaching recorded there.⁸ The southeast Indian Ocean, traditionally considered resilient to warming, has seen increasingly frequent marine heatwave-driven bleaching events in recent decades as well.⁹ The pattern is clear: El Niño is eroding the safety margins of reefs that were once thought to have a buffer.

Fisheries and the Anchoveta Problem

Peru’s anchoveta fishery is one of the largest single-species fisheries on the planet, and it is directly tied to the cold, productive upwelling that El Niño suppresses. During El Niño, anchoveta are squeezed into a narrow coastal band and forced deeper as warm water masses push shoreward. In the 2023 event, schools were recorded as deep as 190 meters and compressed into a strip extending only about 66 nautical miles from the coast.¹⁰

The damage goes beyond adult fish displacement. El Niño disrupts the timing of anchoveta reproduction. Under normal conditions, eggs hatch when plankton blooms provide food for new larvae. During the strong 1982–83 and 1997–98 events, abnormal warming pushed the window for optimal egg hatching later in the year, creating a mismatch between when larvae emerged and when their food was available. Larvae that hatch outside this window often starve in their first week of life.¹¹ The result is a collapse in recruitment that can suppress fish stocks for years after the El Niño itself has ended. For Peru, where fishmeal exports are a major revenue source, these collapses ripple through the economy.

Drought, Wildfire, and Carbon Release on Land

El Niño’s effects are not confined to the ocean. It rearranges rainfall across entire continents, drying out regions that are normally wet and flooding areas that are normally dry. In Southeast Asia and parts of the Amazon, El Niño brings drought. In the arid coastal deserts of western South America, it brings unusually heavy rains that cause vegetation to flush and small rodent populations to surge within months.¹²

The drought side is where the damage concentrates. Indonesia is especially vulnerable. During the 2015 El Niño, fire activity and smoke pollution across the Indonesian archipelago exceeded every previous episode recorded by NASA’s satellite fleet going back to the early 2000s. The fire problem is driven by a vicious feedback: degraded peatlands, already cleared and drained for agriculture, become tinder during El Niño droughts. Fire use responds in a sharply nonlinear way once rainfall drops below about 4 millimeters per day, and this sensitivity appears to be increasing over time in Borneo’s Kalimantan region.¹³

Collectively, tropical forests flipped from absorbing carbon to releasing it during the 2015–16 event, with some estimates suggesting up to 2.3 billion tonnes of carbon went into the atmosphere from drought and fire combined.¹⁴ That release is roughly equivalent to what a large industrial nation emits in a year, temporarily undermining the carbon sink that tropical forests normally provide.

Terrestrial Wildlife Under Stress

Large herbivores in tropical and subtropical savannas also feel the effects of El Niño-driven drought. A long-term study of a savanna herbivore population found that the El Niño droughts of 1982–83 and 1991–92 were associated with strongly negative population changes, likely driven by drops in the normally high and stable adult survival rates.¹⁵ Unlike marine wildlife, where starvation from a collapsed food web is the primary killer, terrestrial species are hit through reduced forage quality and water availability during prolonged dry spells. The effects are not always negative everywhere, though. In the arid zones of western South America where El Niño brings rain rather than drought, the burst of vegetation fuels rapid population growth among small mammals, as noted above. The direction of the impact depends entirely on which side of El Niño’s rainfall seesaw a region sits on.

Crop Yields and Global Food Prices

Agriculture is where El Niño’s weather disruptions translate most directly into human welfare. The picture varies by crop and region, but the overall trend is negative for staple grains. One analysis of global harvest data found that El Niño reduced average yields of wheat by about 1.3 percent, rice by about 1.3 percent, and maize by about 0.4 percent, while soybean yields actually increased by roughly 1.9 percent.¹⁶ A separate study found broadly similar patterns, with El Niño likely improving global soybean yields by 2 to 5 percent but changing maize, rice, and wheat yields anywhere from a roughly 4 percent decline to a slight gain, depending on the event.¹⁷

Those percentages sound small in the abstract, but they play out across billions of tonnes of global production. A 1 to 4 percent swing in maize or rice output can tighten global markets, raise prices, and push vulnerable populations into food insecurity, particularly in countries that depend on imports. The soybean exception is interesting: soybean-growing regions in the Americas tend to receive favorable rainfall during El Niño years, offsetting the damage seen elsewhere. This uneven distribution means El Niño does not just reduce food production overall; it reshuffles where food is available, with serious implications for trade-dependent economies.

Disease Outbreaks and Public Health

The link between El Niño and infectious disease runs through two channels: temperature and water. Warmer conditions expand the range and breeding season of mosquitoes that carry dengue, while flooding contaminates drinking water and creates standing-water habitat for disease vectors. During the 2015–16 El Niño, researchers documented a clear pattern: dengue outbreaks in Brazil and Southeast Asia were tied to above-normal temperatures, while cholera in Tanzania and plague in the American Southwest were linked to above-normal rainfall.¹⁸

Dengue is the disease most consistently amplified by El Niño. Strong events correlate positively with global dengue outbreak risk, though the effect varies by region and by the specific characteristics of each El Niño episode.¹⁹ In São Paulo state, Brazil, researchers found that moderate-to-strong El Niño conditions increased the expected number of mosquito-positive containers by about 30 percent compared to neutral conditions, directly boosting the population of the mosquito that transmits dengue, Zika, and chikungunya.²⁰ For public health systems in the tropics, an El Niño forecast is effectively a disease-preparedness warning.

Economic Losses in the Trillions

The combined weight of agricultural disruption, fishery collapses, infrastructure damage, and health spending adds up to staggering economic losses, and recent research suggests the damage persists far longer than the El Niño event itself. One study attributed roughly $4.1 trillion in global income losses to the 1982–83 El Niño and $5.7 trillion to the 1997–98 event, with impacts continuing to drag on economies for years after sea surface temperatures returned to normal.²¹ A separate modeling study confirmed the long tail of these impacts, estimating $2.1 trillion in losses from the 1997–98 event and $3.9 trillion from the 2015–16 event, with damage accumulating for at least three years after the initial shock.²² The exact figures differ between studies because of different modeling approaches, but both point in the same direction: the true economic cost of El Niño is measured in trillions, not billions.

Developing countries bear a disproportionate share. A study focused on the developing world found that a standard El Niño event, equivalent to a 1°C warming of key Pacific sea surface temperatures, reduces annual growth by one to two percent during the El Niño regime.²³ For nations already operating on thin margins, that kind of hit can set back development efforts by years.

Hydropower Vulnerability and Energy Disruption

Countries that rely heavily on hydropower face a specific El Niño risk that is easy to overlook. When El Niño dries out a region, river flows drop, and hydroelectric dams produce less electricity. In the humid tropics of the Americas, El Niño can reduce rainfall during critical recharge periods by up to about 69 percent, limiting groundwater replenishment and pushing rivers toward their minimum flows months early.²⁴ A study of small hydropower sites found that energy production could decline by anywhere from 18 to 46 percent during El Niño years, depending on the flow conditions at each site.²⁵

The knock-on effects are significant. Countries that cannot meet electricity demand from hydro must turn to fossil fuels, increasing both costs and carbon emissions. Net exporters of hydroelectric power lose revenue, while net importers face higher energy bills. This dynamic has played out repeatedly in places that depend on dams for a large share of their electricity grid.²⁶ The irony is hard to miss: an El Niño-driven drought simultaneously increases wildfire risk, reduces food production, strains water supplies, and forces utilities to burn more fossil fuels, compounding the very warming that may intensify future events.

Early Warning and What Actually Helps

El Niño is one of the most predictable climate phenomena on the planet. Forecasters can often identify an emerging event months in advance, which means there is real opportunity to prepare. But the gap between a forecast and an effective response has historically been wide. Research into early warning systems suggests that the key constraint is not predicting El Niño itself but getting actionable information to vulnerable communities fast enough to matter. Newer indicators may extend lead times between an official forecast and the first appearance of adverse impacts, giving humanitarian organizations and local governments more time to act.²⁷

When early action programs do reach communities in time, the results are encouraging. In Peru, households that received modular preparedness kits before the 2017 El Niño experienced roughly 63 to 66 percent less housing damage than those that did not.²⁸ In Nicaragua and Ethiopia, rural communities that had participated in resilience-building programs were better able to mitigate drought impacts on their crops, more organized in accessing relief, and recovered more quickly afterward.²⁹ The lesson is not that El Niño damage is inevitable. It is that the damage is concentrated in places with the least capacity to prepare, and that relatively modest investments in early action can dramatically reduce losses.

Why Extreme El Niño Events May Become More Common

Climate projections add an uncomfortable wrinkle to all of this. Under continued greenhouse warming, the frequency of extreme El Niño events is projected to increase. The mechanism is straightforward: the eastern equatorial Pacific is warming faster than surrounding regions, making it easier for the atmosphere to cross the threshold into the kind of deep convective activity that defines an extreme event. This increased frequency accounts for roughly half of the projected rise in mean rainfall over the eastern equatorial Pacific.³⁰ If these projections hold, the multi-trillion-dollar losses, the coral bleaching events, the fishery collapses, and the disease outbreaks described throughout this article would happen more often, with less recovery time in between. For species like the Galápagos penguin, which already recovers only slowly between events, the prospect of more frequent extreme El Niños is a genuine conservation crisis. For developing nations already stretched thin by existing events, it amounts to a compounding debt of climate damages with no clear ceiling.