Edition: 7 July 2026
Theme: El Niño — What the Pacific’s Great Warming Brings
On 11 June 2026, the NOAA officially declared El Niño conditions in the tropical Pacific. Sea surface temperatures in the El Niño 3.4 monitoring region had climbed to +1.7°C above average by mid-June, and models now project a 63 percent chance this becomes a very strong or historic event by late 2026. El Niño causes disruption to the environment, communities and is a serious risk to public health. But El Niño can also bring with it some positive impacts to specific places and ecosystems, and without diminishing the hardships it can bring, this week I want to highlight those. Here are five positive impacts the current El Niño is having around the world.
1. El Niño brings calm to the Atlantic Hurricane Season
In June 2026, both NOAA and Colorado State University (CSU) revised their Atlantic hurricane season forecasts sharply downward, citing the rapidly developing El Niño as the dominant factor. The resulting atmospheric changes El Niño creates produce a higher-than-average vertical wind shear in the tropical Atlantic. This can prevent tropical cyclones from forming or intensifying. In other words, El Niño breaks hurricanes down before they become dangerous.
NOAA now predicts a 55% chance of a below-normal season, with just 8 to 14 named storms compared to a historical average of 14 to 17. CSU dropped its forecast to 11 named storms, only 5 of which are expected to become hurricanes.
Source: NOAA — 2026 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook, May 2026; Yale Climate Connections — June 2026
Buen Vivir connection: Reciprocity.Coastal communities have always read the sea for signs of what is coming. El Niño, in this instance, is sending a signal of relative calm. That breathing space matters for communities that are still recovering from recent storm seasons.
Why it matters: This matters enormously for the tens of millions of people living in coastal communities from the Gulf Coast to the Caribbean. A quieter hurricane season is not without risk entirely, but the current El Niño has significantly reduced the odds of a catastrophic hurricane making landfall this year, and that is genuinely good news.
2. The Colorado River will receive life-restoring rainfall
A multi-decadal drought, compounded by record-low snowpack this past winter, has pushed Lake Mead and Lake Powell– the two largest reservoirs on the Colorado River – to some of the lowest water levels since they were constructed. The reservoirs are the primary water supply for tens of millions of people across the American Southwest.
El Niño is now the most significant source of hope for rainfall relief. Strong El Niño events historically bring above-average precipitation to the US Southwest, and the developing 2026 event is already influencing the monsoon outlook. NOAA’s drought monitoring team noted that El Niño events have been drought-busters for the Southern US in past strong cycles, including the winters of 1982 to 1983, 1997 to 1998, and 2015 to 2016. A strong-to-very-strong (or so-called ‘super’ El Niño) event this year could help recharge both reservoirs and the groundwater aquifers that underlie farming communities across Arizona, New Mexico, and southern California.
Source: Weather West — El Niño 2026 Analysis, June 2026; Drought.gov — El Niño and the Southern Plains, March 2026
Buen Vivir connection: Water is life. It is the foundation of everything. For the communities, farms, and ecosystems of the American Southwest that have been living under increasing scarcity, the promise of El Niño rains this year bring with it both food security and the regeneration.
Why it matters: The Colorado River sustains 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland. Its long-term health depends on wet winters. The current El Niño may not fully restore what years of drought have taken, but it meaningfully shifts the odds in the river’s favour.
3. Chile’s Atacama Desert is blooming
The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is one of the driest places on Earth. For this reason it is often used to study conditions on mars, a hyper-arid desert. In a normal year, it receives less than four millimetres of rain, but the Atacama has a long memory of El Niño. The warming of Pacific waters along the South American coast that defines El Niño brings anomalous rainfall to the region, which triggers one of the most extraordinary ecological events on the planet: the desierto florido (or flowering desert).
In August 2025, ahead of the formal declaration of El Niño conditions, the Atacama received a rare downpour of more than 12 millimetres of rain. More than 200 species of wildflowers bloomed across hillsides that had been bare for years: fuchsia, yellow, violet, white. This is because seeds that had been dormant in the soil for up to 15 years germinated almost simultaneously. Scientists who have studied the Atacama for decades describe the botanical response to El Niño rainfall as one of the most dramatic ecological events associated with any climate phenomenon on Earth. The blooms have also been documented in 1983, 1991, 1998, 2005, 2012, and 2015 — all El Niño years. This encourgaed the Chilean government to create the Desierto Florido National Park in 2023, protecting 57,000 hectares of this desert ecosystem and the seed banks that make the blooms possible. As the current El Niño intensifies through 2026, another bloom season is anticipated for the region.
Source: EBSCO Research — Atacama Desert Ecosystem; PLOS One — El Niño and Coastal Desert Vegetation, 2018
Buen Vivir connection: For Atacama’s seeds that hold the memory of past rains and the potential for future abundance, El Niño is their signal for a healthy environment, allowing it to flourish.
Why it matters: The Desierto Florido National Park is a direct conservation response to the link between El Niño rainfall and this extraordinary biodiversity. The Atacama’s endemic flowering plants exist nowhere else on Earth, and protecting the seed banks now means the blooms will continue long into the future.
4. Peru’s fog oases are expanding
IMAGE — Pexels search: “Peru lomas coast fog green hills” / “coastal Peru desert oasis vegetation” / “lomas de lachay Peru plants”
Along the Pacific coast of Peru lie the lomas, or fog oases, which are some of the most unusual ecosystems on Earth. Moisture from Pacific fogs supports surprisingly rich life in an otherwise hyperarid landscape, pushing isolated communities of plants to cling to coastal hillsides. The lomas are both fragile and seasonal, and intimately connected to El Niño.
Research published in PLOS One tracked a lomas ecosystem at Lomas de Lachay through the 1997 to 1998 El Niño, and found strong, consistent positive correlations between El Niño rainfall and vegetation cover, plant density, species diversity, and richness of endemic species. Scientists describe El Niño as one of the main forces shaping coastal desert vegetation across South America, which is essential to the long-term functioning and evolutionary history of communities across the Andes.
Scientists and conservationists in Peru are watching closely as the 2026 El Niño strengthens and Pacific sea surface temperatures rise, suggesting this El Niño may produce one of the most significant lomas bloom years in a generation.
Source: PLOS One / PMC — El Niño and Peru’s Lomas Ecosystems; NASA Earth Observatory — El Niño Is Underway, June 2026
Buen Vivir connection: The lomas hold ancient cultural significance. For thousands of years, the lomas have strengthened the relationship between people, plants, and Pacific climate for the people of the Andes. They are one of the oldest and most continuous examples of ecological knowledge on the continent and highlight the importance of reciprocity, harmony and a healthy environment.
Why it matters: The lomas are among the most threatened ecosystems in South America, wedged between urban expansion, wide-scale agriculture, and mining. Understanding how important El Niño rainfall is to their survival, strengthens the scientific and cultural case for protecting them.
5. The 2026 El Niño is teaching us about better adaptation and resilience
The 2026 El Niño is the most closely observed in human history. The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission launched in 2020, is providing unprecedented real-time mapping of sea surface height anomalies across the Pacific, a reliable proxy for ocean temperature. Scientists are now tracking not just whether this becomes a historic event, but what it will teach us about how a warming baseline ocean amplifies and reshapes the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
Source: NASA Earth Observatory — El Niño Is Underway, June 2026; IRI Columbia — June 2026 ENSO Quick Look
Buen Vivir connection: El Niño has been shaping life on Earth for millions of years. That we can now watch it unfold in real time, tracking warm water moving across an ocean in satellite images, is a remarkable convergence of human knowledge and planetary scale. The question is whether we use that knowledge wisely.
Why it matters: The scientific attention matters beyond the data. The better we understand El Niño in real time, the more accurately communities can prepare for its impacts and its challenges, the more precisely we can anticipate ecosystem responses, and the more we learn about the deep relationship between Pacific climate and life on Earth. In other words by monitoring what’s happening now, it can help us better prepare for adaptation in the future. Accurate, early El Niño prediction saves lives, protects food systems, and allows ecosystems and communities to prepare. The investment in ocean monitoring and climate science that makes this possible is one of the most consequential and underappreciated forms of planetary stewardship we have.
El Niño is here, strengthening, and heading toward what may become a historic event. It will bring disruption in some places and real hardship, but it will also bring rain to parched deserts, calm hurricane-prone coastlines, and help bloom some of the most extraordinary ecosystems on Earth. Paying attention to both sides of that story is not optimism, it is accuracy.
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