Drought and deluge: How El Niño could strike Africa on multiple fronts
African farmers are bracing themselves for opposing climate extremes as scientists predict a super El Niño season: drying out crops in the South, drowning the East, and making rain unpredictable in the Sahel. In this blog, we explore the potential consequences for food and agriculture, and how farmers can adapt.
- Africa
- Climate Action
- climate change
- crops
- food security
Drought and deluge: How El Niño could strike Africa on multiple fronts
African farmers are bracing themselves for opposing climate extremes as scientists predict a super El Niño season: drying out crops in the South, drowning the East, and making rain unpredictable in the Sahel. In this blog, we explore the potential consequences for food and agriculture, and how farmers can adapt.
One climate phenomenon, three African realities
In July 2023, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed the arrival of an El Niño that would become one of the most powerful ever recorded: an abnormal warming of the equatorial Pacific that, through an interplay of currents and winds, reshapes rainfall thousands of kilometers away.
Yet two often-confused notions need to be distinguished. El Niño belongs to climate variability, a natural cycle that returns every two to seven years and then withdraws. Climate change, by contrast, is human-caused, a long-term trend (30 years), and therefore lasting. The two are not opposed: they overlap. By raising the planet’s baseline temperature, warming makes each El Niño episode hotter, and therefore potentially more extreme, which is what justifies, this year, the label of a “super” El Niño.
Its effects reach far beyond the fields. They hit electricity production, when dams run short of water, and public health, when the shortage of drinking water opens the door to epidemics.
But their most baffling feature is the lack of uniformity. On a single continent, and sometimes at the same time, El Niño can produce diametrically opposed signals: it dries out southern Africa, swells the rivers of East Africa, and throws the Sahel’s seasons into disorder. It is this dipole, drought on one side, deluge on the other, unpredictability in between, that makes the continent so hard to prepare for as a single whole. For food systems that depend heavily on rainy seasons and are barely insured, the question becomes singular: how can millions of smallholders be protected when the threat does not wear the same face everywhere? The three theatres that follow, Zambia, Kenya and the Sahel, each answer in their own way.