Joint Press Conference: OCHA / WMO - El Niño is set to hit Fragile Communities hard

Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming to this press conference, which has been announced recently, but on a very important subject, which is the situation with the unprecedented El Nino. And we have the great privilege to have two Under-Secretary-Generals here to tell us about their call. On my left, Celeste Saulo, the Secretary-General of the World Organization. And at our left, Tom Fletcher, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. So, as usual, we will have some introductory remarks by our two speakers, and then we'll open the floor to questions. And I'd also like to inform that we have lots of journalists online. So, I'd like to start now with Secretary-General Celeste Sautou for her introductory remarks. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Dear journalists, thank you for joining us today at such short notice. But the World Meteorological Organization is today releasing a new seasonal climate outlook, which indicates that the current El Nino event could be unprecedented in strength, literally off the monitoring charts that we have used for the past four decades. El Nino will peak towards the end of 2026, but its impacts will be felt long after that. Our latest global seasonal climate update forecasts that sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, the epicenter of El Nino, may rise to 3.8 degrees Celsius above average during November 2026 to January 2027. This will have far-reaching consequences for weather patterns across the world. And what does this mean in practical terms? A very strong El Nino disrupts normal temperature and rainfall patterns across many, many regions. It can bring severe drought to some regions, heavy rainfall and flooding to others, and increase, of course, heat across large parts of the world. We are already witnessing extreme weather events and expect this to multiply and cascade as El Nino intensifies. But a powerful El Nino does not have to be a recipe for humanitarian disaster. We have the science, the forecasts, the early warnings to save lives and protect livelihoods. What we need now is decisive action, especially to protect the most vulnerable communities. That is why I am here today with Under-Secretary-General Tom Flichster. The window for preparedness is still open in many regions. Extreme weather conditions do not need to translate into humanitarian emergencies or into casualties. But this window will not remain open indefinitely. WMO's priority is to provide science-based information to assist governments and humanitarian organizations anticipate risks, prepare operations, and protect vulnerable populations. El Nino can compound humanitarian needs, particularly for already vulnerable populations like refugees, communities living in conflict, and displaced populations where housing, water, sanitation, and health services are already under pressure. So what does our latest outlook tell us? East Africa, wetter than normal conditions are more likely in part of the regions during the October-December rainy season, increasing concerns about heavy rainfall and flooding. In Southern Africa, Increased risk of dry conditions could affect crop production, water availability, and livelihoods from November, the typical start of the rainy season. In Southeast Asia, warmer conditions and rainfall deficit increase the risk of heat exposure and place additional pressure on agriculture and water supplies, like the increasing wildfire and smoke hazards risks we are already seeing. In the Americas, increased rainfall in Northwest US and southern parts of Western South America. We have all seen the images of flooding in Chile and the Parana Basin. North America and the northern portion of the Caribbean is also expected to face above normal precipitation. But in turn, there is increased drought risk in parts of Central America, the southern Caribbean, and the Amazon. These are regional and seasonal outlooks, not predictions of individual events. Regional and national forecasts are thus essential to identify where and when action is needed. Our greatest concern is for people already living on the edge. WMO is working closely with OCHA and partners across the United Nations and the humanitarian community to turn climate forecasts into practical decisions. Today, we are issuing a joint call for urgent and coordinated anticipatory action. The forecasts give us advance warning, and we must use that warning to protect those most at risk. We cannot stop El Nino, but we can prevent many of its worst human consequences. Let us join together and ensure that we leave nobody behind. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Secretary General, indeed. And now let me give the floor to Tom Fletcher, our Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Tom.

Well, thank you very much, Secretary General, and thank you, colleagues, for coming together at such short notice. I think You can understand from what you've just heard the gravity of the challenge that we face. The Secretary General has described the reality of what is coming our way, off the charts. And you've heard the predictions from the experts. So this is serious and we need to get serious. This El Nino is a behemoth, it is a wrecking ball. It will tear through, as you've heard, Latin America, eastern and southern Africa, Asia and the Pacific with extreme heat, droughts and floods. And that has massive humanitarian consequences. 50 million people could face increased hunger. The African Development Bank estimates that it will cost African countries between 10 and 20 billion US dollars and drive down GDP by between 1 and 2%. And of course, this hits regions. It comes on top of widespread conflict, people already displaced, soaring fuel and fertilizer and food prices, and massive aid cuts. The damage will not stay in the countries in the immediate path of this El Nino. It will create economic shocks for the global economy and drive further conflict, displacement, migration. So a global threat on this scale requires the full mobilization of a global response. We now need all hands on deck. First, we must prepare people who are in the path of El Nino. Now, we're better placed to do that than with the last El Nino. The technology has moved on rapidly. The forecasting has moved on rapidly. And we're applying the lessons we learned from previous crises. We're using the best technology we can get our hands on to ensure that communities are as resilient as they can be. To support that work, I've released over $50 million from our Central Emergency Response Fund to help 11 countries on the front line, including Chad, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan. I've instructed our humanitarian coordinators to use our pooled humanitarian funds to prepare, and we've adjusted our global humanitarian plan for this new reality. What this means in practice is getting cash to families before the shock hits. It means helping farmers and herders protect their crops and their livestock. It means moving supplies to safety before roads are cut. I hope, we hope, that this will allow communities to act before crops fail, before families lose their livestock, before floods drive people from their homes. We call this work, as you heard, anticipatory action, common sense. So, we call on countries, on development banks, on international financial institutions to get the funding moving to this work before that damage is done, not afterwards. The next two weeks are the critical window to act before that damage is done. Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya need cash and supplies ahead of heavy rains. Southern Africa needs seeds and livestock before planning windows close. Central America needs immediate livelihood assistance, while Asia and the Pacific must prepare for droughts, floods, and cyclones. It would be an extraordinary failure to see this crisis coming, to hear the predictions from the experts, and yet still squander the opportunity to protect people in its path. And so I pay tribute to the work of the WMO, to our colleagues across the humanitarian community working together as part of the humanitarian reset to deliver this support more efficiently, and to our colleagues across the United Nations, working as part of the Secretary-General's UN80 reform plan to deliver as one team. My second ask, I'm sounding the alarm that the humanitarian system, this community of ours, cannot alone cope with a threat on this scale. I'm calling for a much wider global mobilization of solidarity, expertise and action across governments, civil societies, academics, businesses. So I'm writing to countries with existing disaster response capacity, part of our coordinated emergency network, to ask them to place that capacity on immediate standby to support the effort. I've placed our full disaster readiness network on full alert. And I'm asking countries in the front line to be clear and with us about the gaps that you face and the support that you need. To the scientific community, please join our cell, which we've activated today, to share data, forecasts, advice on the humanitarian response. We need that detailed work to help countries reduce the danger. To the private sector, including technology companies, please come forward to help us prepare the response. Yes, we need funding, but we also need that practical problem-solving support that you offer. Finally, to build global resilience to this challenge, we need to protect and buttress the systems for global coordination and cooperation. We need to shift all this unnecessary noise and energy away from indiscriminate attacks on the international system, on the United Nations. and towards how we can work better together. We need those within the international system to reduce their focus on any distraction that calls us away from this crisis and the crises like this that deserve our attention. We need more collective focus on how to future-proof the world. And as part of that, we need a sustained, energized push for peacemaking and conflict prevention, including in these areas that will be hit by El Nino. So the choice is clear. We can wait for disaster or we can invest in resilience. We cannot prevent El Nino, but we can be serious about the challenges ahead, and we can be creative and generous in preparing for them. Thank you.

Such an important and urgent call. Thank you very much to our speakers. Now, let me open the floor to questions. First in the room, Robin Millard, AFP, French news agency.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Just to, Secretary-General, just to put it into context, how far off the charts are we talking here? And what are the driving factors that have made this so extreme. And Mr. Fletcher, looking ahead, how far ahead are you planning that the humanitarian pain of this episode might last? Thank you.

Okay. Thank you for that question. In terms of how far, just as a reminder, whenever we have an anomaly at this area in the Pacific above 0.5 degrees, we declare El Nino. And we are suspecting an anomaly of 3.8. We have not seen in our records 3.8. We have seen around 3 in some record El Ninos before with very substantive impacts across the world. So we are beyond that limit, out of our records, out of our statistics of what we can expect. So that is why it is so important to be prepared. And of course, it's also about monitoring the day by day evolution and also the focus, the authorized focus, because at this stage, what we want to avoid also are too many voices. telling different stories. That's why the UN system works together to make sure that there is a unified voice. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Robin. And if I could just underline that last point, it's so important that we have an authoritative voice here of expertise that can help all of us who are responding to this crisis to judge where best we can add value. Look, I mean, Robin, how long does the pain last? It's hard to say. I mean, I think we've got to look at several phases of this crisis. There's the phase now where we're trying to do as much as possible to prepare, because of course, actually, communities are already starting to be hit. And I've described some of the ways that we can do that with cash assistance, livelihoods, seeds, moving crops around, preparing communities that will be cut off when roads are blocked, for example. but also working with local governments where populations will need to move out of the way of the worst of the disaster. So there's that phase. Then there's the phase of the crisis response, and that's what we're trying to mobilize in this period now, using the network of responders that we have globally. This cannot just be a United Nations response. We need to work with all of those governments most hit, but also governments globally that have enormous capacity in leading these kinds of responses. We have with us today Mehmet Golioglu, who's joining shortly the United Nations team running the OCHA office here in Geneva, who comes from one of those governments in Turkey that has responded to crises on a massive scale. So we're making sure we've got that expertise and that we're bringing it together. But that long-term impact will be felt for months and potentially years to come, I'm afraid, because It's this overlaying of crisis on crisis and crisis. And when, you know, we've seen with the choke points, Bab al-Mandab, Straits of Hormuz, Black Sea, that growth in fuel, food, and fertilizer costs, this will have a further damaging impact on those costs. And so the risk is you have tens of millions of people pushed into humanitarian need. And of course, we've got 250 million plus people that we should be reaching already. We're just finalizing our global humanitarian overview for 2027. This will push the numbers in the wrong direction, I'm afraid.

Let me go to the platform, Olivia Le Poitvin, Reuters.

Hello, thanks, Yulu. Just a question on the report. Is this a new report published today? And if so, yeah, if we could have sight of it. I was just a bit confused, as I don't think I have received that report from the WMO. So I just want to confirm that this is new data from your outlook released today. And also just a comparison of how much further this data has taken your concern in comparison to the previous one where you already raised pretty a strong alarm about what you're predicting. So what's new from this finding? Thank you so much.

Yes, we are launching the global seasonal outlook. And in this case, we are sharing with everyone the forecast for October, November, December. And it's not only about El Nino and how the El Nino is evolving, but it's also about what we expect from temperature patterns and precipitation patterns. And that is informing our latest report. And it's, in a way, a confirmation of the trends we already mentioned, but in some cases, signal is so coherent now and it's so clear the impacts in, as I said, Central America, South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia with clear patterns, with all the information consistently pointing out at the same result. So essentially, it's a stronger anomaly in the equatorial Pacific, but stronger anomalies and stronger amounts of precipitation probability across the world that is the one that we want to highlight, including also the consistent pattern on higher temperatures across the whole world.

Thank you very much, Celeste. And I see, Olivia, that Claire has put the link to the report and to the statement. It's in the chat. Other questions? John, John Zarocostas, The Lancet, and Francois Ancart.

Yes, my question is to Mr. Fletcher. Mr. Fletcher, I was wondering, sir, how do you propose to help some of these countries that are embroiled simultaneously in armed conflicts, especially in the Horn of Africa?

Thank you. Thank you, John. And that is such a crucial question because, of course, we can't deal with these different challenges, El Nino, the existing humanitarian caseload, conflict, displacement, in isolation. They're all part of the same equation and they all feed off each other. I know that our colleagues at UNHCR and IOM are preparing for waves of displacement, just as our colleagues at the FAO and WFP are preparing for the threats to food supplies and livelihoods, and colleagues at UNICEF and WHO are preparing for pressure on water, nutrition and health services. But just that list of humanitarian challenges, any one of those can trigger further conflict. And so we do need that much more sustained, resolute, creative diplomacy on these conflicts in the region. And of course, the list of conflicts across this region is growing right now. And so we're fully supporting our friends and colleagues on the political side of the United Nations, the workforce of Secretary-General Guterres on these different crises. but also the work of many foreign ministers, many countries across the region to try to resolve those conflicts. In the midst of that, I'm personally very focused on an effort to reach 11 million people globally that we can't currently reach because of access across those fighting lines. So 11 million people in 10 different conflicts. And on each of those, I'm working with key players across those regions to try to ensure we can access people in those areas. I fear, well, I know El Nino will make that even harder, that work, but even more urgent.

Thank you very much. Is there any other question for our speakers? Let me see on the platform. No, I don't see any hand up. So I think we have all heard your calls and we trust our journalists here and online to give it as much coverage as possible. And I would like to thank you very, very much for having taken the occasion of his visit and for Celeste, the occasion of the publication of this report to come and brief our journalists. Thank you very much. Thanks, everybody, and have a nice afternoon. 30 here for the press conference on Sudan, on the consultative meeting. Thank you.