The Super El Niño of 2026: The Cultural and Anthropological Conversation That We Must Have Now

 In May 2026, the World Meteorological Organisation confirmed what climate scientists had been tracking with growing alarm for months. An El Niño event is expected to develop from mid-2026, impacting global temperature and rainfall patterns, with sea-surface temperatures rising rapidly in the Equatorial Pacific.1 The International Research Institute for Climate and Society placed the probability of El Niño conditions forming by May–July 2026 at 98%, with those probabilities remaining exceptionally high at 97–98% throughout the forecast period, extending through early 2027.2 Three separate forecast authorities — NOAA, the ECMWF, and the IRI — are projecting an event that could become the strongest El Niño in the modern instrumental record.

Dr Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, put the situation plainly: “We’ve never experienced a strong or very strong El Niño event amid pre-existing conditions that were this warm globally. Therefore, it would not be surprising to see some unprecedented global impacts by later in 2026 into 2027 in terms of flood, drought, and wildfire-related extremes.”3 A December 2025 study published in Nature Communications added a structural dimension to this warning: a super El Niño year can trigger “climate regime shifts” — sudden and persistent changes in a climate system that pose serious threats to ecosystems and human well-being, and a warming world would make them a more frequent occurrence.4

The numbers bear this out historically. Research published in the journal Science attributes $4.1 trillion and $5.7 trillion in global income losses to the 1982–83 and 1997–98 El Niño events, respectively, with the economic damage persisting for more than five years after each event.5 A 2023 study in Nature Communications, using a nonlinear climate-economy model, calculated that the cumulative economic loss attributable to the 1997–98 and 2015–16 El Niño events amounts to $2.1 trillion and $3.9 trillion globally, with the damage continuing to grow for three years after the initial climate shock.6 If the 2026 event exceeds its predecessors in intensity, as current projections suggest it might, there is no existing economic model that can confidently bound the damage.

Here we try to understand what is coming — and preparing for it — requires more than meteorology and macroeconomics. It requires anthropology: the discipline best equipped to read how climate disruption moves through communities, erodes inherited knowledge systems, fractures cultural continuity, and forces societies to reorganise around conditions they were never built to absorb.

The Indian Monsoon as an Economic and Cultural Foundation

Before examining what El Niño does to India, it is necessary to understand precisely what it disrupts. The Indian Summer-Monsoon — the southwest monsoon that moves across the subcontinent between June and September — is the structural backbone of the country’s agrarian economy and, by extension, of its social order. The Indian Summer Monsoon contributes about 75% of India’s annual precipitation, and 56% of the total cultivated area depends on rainfed farming.7 Agriculture contributes approximately 18–20% to India’s Gross Value Added and employs close to half the country’s workforce — a figure that translates to roughly 600 to 700 million people.

The summer-monsoon season contributes 80% of total annual rainfall, aligning directly with the main crop-growing season. In regions with limited access to irrigation, the dependence on a normal monsoon is even more pronounced.8 The kharif season, which runs from June to October, produces rice, pulses, oilseeds, cotton, and sugarcane — the dietary and export staples of an agrarian economy that feeds 1.5 billion people. A weak monsoon can lead the government to restrict farm exports, as it did during the 2023 El Niño, and raise imports of edible oils such as palm oil and soyoil. A weaker monsoon could also hit power generation by reducing hydropower output, which accounts for about 6% of the country’s energy mix.9

What conventional economic analysis consistently underweights is that the monsoon is not merely an input variable in an agricultural production equation. It is a temporal organising principle around which communities have structured their cultural calendars, their ritual lives, their credit cycles, their marriage seasons, and their social obligations for centuries. The classical texts of the subcontinent — from Kautilya’s Arthashastra to the Brihat Samhita of Varahamihira — contain systematic frameworks for predicting rainfall, managing water reservoirs, and calibrating state response to agrarian failure. When the monsoon behaves erratically, it is not only the crop that fails. It is a system of relations — between communities, between generations, between human beings and the land — that begins to come apart.

What Past Super El Niños Did to India

India’s relationship with El Niño is long, documented, and often catastrophic. Research in Geophysical Research Letters confirmed that India experienced seven major drought periods between 1876 and 2015, and that the three most deadly — 1877, 1896, and 1899 — were linked with the positive phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. Five of India’s six major famines between 1870 and 2016 are linked to soil moisture drought.10

The Great Drought of 1876–78 caused the death of an estimated 6–10 million people. The summer monsoon rains on which crops depended had failed without warning. Famine returned in 1896–97 and 1899–1900, in each case caused or exacerbated by El Niño.11 The 1791–92 Doji Bara famine — known in folk memory as the Skull Famine — was produced by an El Niño event that lasted from 1789 to 1795. The El Niño event caused the failure of the South Asian monsoon for four consecutive years. Contemporary accounts describe villages where fully half the inhabitants died, while those who survived wandered and never returned.12

In the modern period, the record is more nuanced but no less instructive. Several major El Niño years — including 1965–66, 1972–73, 1987–88, 2002, 2009, and 2015–16 — were associated with drought-like conditions, reduced agricultural output, and economic stress. The 1987–88 episode led to one of the most severe droughts in recent history, affecting vast regions and exposing vulnerabilities in water and food systems.13 Between 1951 and 2022, roughly 60% of El Niño years recorded below-average rainfall in India. During the 2015–16 super El Niño, India received only 86% of average monsoon rainfall, leading to severe drought in several regions. At the same time, Chennai experienced catastrophic flooding caused by concentrated bursts of extreme rainfall. In 2023, another El Niño year, India recorded a 36% rainfall deficit in August, causing significant stress in parts of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh.14

The 1997–98 event — the strongest El Niño before 2015–16 — produced an instructive counter-example: India’s monsoon that year was near normal, spared by the Indian Ocean Dipole acting as a counterforce. This variability is important, because it tells us that El Niño increases systemic risk without guaranteeing a specific outcome. What 2026 introduces, however, is a new and significantly more dangerous baseline: the event is forming against a background of historically elevated global sea surface temperatures, which removes the buffer that cushioned India in 1997.

What 2026 Is Projected to Do

The India Meteorological Department has issued a direct warning. The IMD has warned that the developing El Niño could weaken the 2026 monsoon season and increase the risk of drought-like conditions in several regions. States including Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Gujarat, and Rajasthan have historically remained among the most drought-prone during El Niño years. At the same time, some coastal regions may witness episodes of excess rainfall and flooding.15

The probability assessments are concerning. The probability of a deficient season — rainfall below 90% of the Long Period Average — is assessed at 35%, more than double the long-term climatological probability of 16%. The chances of a below-normal season stand at 31%, while the probability of normal rainfall is only 27%. The chances of an above-normal or excess rainfall season are only 6% and 1%, respectively.16

Dr Vishwas Chitale, Fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, stated: “A developing El Niño, particularly if it intensifies into a strong or ‘super’ El Niño event, can significantly amplify summer heatwaves in India. Our analysis of the last four decades shows that the frequency of very hot days and warm nights has generally been significantly higher following El Niño years.”17 

The compound effect — heatwaves reducing agricultural labour productivity, reduced hydropower increasing energy costs, and food inflation cascading through urban and rural consumption simultaneously — creates what economists call a multi-sector shock. For India’s poor, it arrives as a single, undifferentiated experience of scarcity.

A Super El Niño can cause widespread drought across many parts of India, with farmers, food production, and water reservoirs facing severe stress. This may lead to food inflation, water scarcity, and economic slowdown. Northwest and central India face a high risk of drought and heatwaves, while the Himalayan region may see changes in snowfall patterns.18 Former IMD Director General K.J. Ramesh warned that “the worst-case scenario could be a slightly negative rainfall during the monsoon,” while also noting that accumulated atmospheric moisture from a warming planet could produce intense, localised rainfall even within an overall deficient season — the pattern that made 2015–16 simultaneously a drought and a flood emergency.19

The Anthropology of Climate Disruption: Beyond GDP

When drought arrives, what standard economics records as GDP decline is only the surface layer of a far more complex disruption. Anthropology provides the tools to read the layers beneath: how climate extremes move through families, disrupt knowledge transmission between generations, erode community institutions, and produce cultural changes that persist long after the rains return.

The first and most immediate anthropological consequence of monsoon failure is distress migration. Agrarian crisis accelerates the movement of rural populations to cities and peri-urban zones that lack the infrastructure to absorb them. In Odisha, this pattern is visible in the seasonal and increasingly permanent out-migration from the KBK districts — Kalahandi, Bolangir, and Koraput — which have historically been the most vulnerable to rainfall deficits. The migration represents the dislocation of communities from landscapes that carry their ritual and ecological memory, and the severing of intergenerational knowledge transmission that depends on sustained relationships.

The second consequence is the erosion of what anthropologists and heritage scholars call Indigenous and Local Knowledge systems. These are not romantic abstractions. They are functional, precision-calibrated systems of ecological observation developed over centuries. Research in Rajasthan showed that a combination of climate change and forest clearing was affecting traditional decision-making strategies for farming, which local farmers said relied on faunal indicators and signals. Traditional resilience strategies of maintaining livestock have also become ineffective due to changing weather and land use.20 Across India’s tribal communities, the birds, plants, and atmospheric signals that once served as reliable seasonal indicators are becoming unreliable — not because the knowledge has been forgotten, but because the natural systems the knowledge describes are behaving in unprecedented ways. The knowledge persists; the world it maps is changing faster than the maps can be redrawn.

Indigenous Knowledge systems are deeply embedded in cultural, ecological, and spiritual relationships with the environment. Many communities in India combine Indigenous Knowledge with scientific information in forecasting weather and seasons. Religious and cultural beliefs are integral to many Indigenous adaptation strategies, with spiritual practices and taboos often functioning as conservation tools that reinforce social cohesion and encourage sustainable resource use.21 When climate disruption erodes these systems, it does not merely reduce agricultural efficiency. It dissolves the social cohesion that communities need most precisely when conditions deteriorate.

The third consequence is the destruction of material cultural heritage. Water stress causes the deterioration of earthen and brick-built heritage structures — step-wells, tank embankments, temple precincts, and village commons — that were designed around specific hydrological regimes. Flash flooding caused by erratic rainfall damages archaeological sites, displaces communities from heritage landscapes, and accelerates the physical erosion of structures that serve as anchors of collective memory and identity. The UNESCO Framework for Global Climate Resilience formally acknowledges this dimension, recognising that interventions must integrate cultural narratives and Indigenous stewardship into planning, land management, and policy, ensuring strategies reflect local histories and ecological practices.22

The fourth consequence — largely invisible in policy discussions — is what might be called the cultural economy of catastrophe. Festivals, craft traditions, seasonal markets, and pilgrimage economies that depend on predictable weather patterns and agricultural surplus are disrupted when climate shock arrives. When drought reduces agricultural income, discretionary spending on cultural participation collapses first, hollowing out the informal cultural economy before any formal economic indicator registers the damage.

The Question of Preparedness

The historical record contains one piece of genuine encouragement. In general, the negative effects of El Niño have decreased through the twentieth century as societies’ ability to deal with climate extremes has increased. The days of famines in India that kill more than ten million people, such as in 1877, are fortunately behind us, mostly because we now have a much better understanding of what El Niño is and are therefore able to predict it with a reasonable degree of accuracy.23 Preparedness, in other words, is not merely aspiration. It is a demonstrated historical variable that has already saved millions of lives.

The question is whether India’s current preparedness infrastructure is calibrated to the scale of what a record-strength El Niño in 2026 might produce. The National Disaster Management Authority has protocols for drought and flood. The IMD issues seasonal forecasts with increasing sophistication. The Public Distribution System provides a buffer against food price inflation, though its reach is incomplete and its response lag remains a structural problem. What is less developed — almost entirely absent, in fact — is a preparedness framework that takes seriously the cultural and knowledge dimensions of climate vulnerability.

Anthropological research has highlighted the resilience and adaptability of Indigenous communities in the face of climate change. Indigenous communities have developed a range of strategies to adapt to climate change, including changes to their farming practices, migration patterns, and use of traditional knowledge to predict weather patterns. These strategies are often highly context-specific and reflect the unique cultural, social, and environmental contexts of different communities.24 

The UNDP, UNESCO, and the IPCC have all formally recognised in recent assessment reports that Indigenous and local knowledge is not supplementary to climate adaptation — it is foundational to it. Integrating Indigenous knowledge into social and environmental policy frameworks at local, national, and regional levels, and incorporating Indigenous history, culture, and knowledge systems into education programmes are essential for effective, culturally sensitive, and sustainable environmental conservation.25

For India, this translates into a specific policy imperative: drought preparedness must include community-level documentation and activation of traditional ecological knowledge before crisis arrives, not after. It must include the mapping of culturally significant landscapes and heritage structures that will require protection under hydrological stress. It must include early warning systems that communicate risk in the languages, formats, and cultural registers that rural communities actually use. And it must include the deliberate retention — through economic support and institutional recognition — of the traditional farming, water management, and weather-reading practices that have historically formed the first line of resilience.

Communities are applying low-impact ancestral techniques — stilt houses, rammed-earth structures, traditional tank systems — to modern contexts, showing how inherited practices reduce vulnerability, enhance resilience, and inform sustainable design. Embedding heritage and knowledge into governance, land use, and stewardship ensures that adaptation strategies reflect local histories and ecological practices.26 India has no shortage of such practices — from the johads of Rajasthan to the katas of Odisha, from the tank irrigation systems of the Deccan to the floodwater farming traditions of the northeast. What it lacks is a policy culture that treats these systems as serious inputs into climate adaptation rather than ethnographic curiosities.

What the Super El Niño Reveals About Our Priorities

The approaching Super El Niño is, among other things, a diagnostic event. It will test not only India’s agricultural infrastructure and food distribution systems but also the quality of the country’s relationship with its own inherited ecological intelligence. The communities most likely to suffer the worst consequences are also the communities that carry the richest stores of climate-adaptive knowledge — knowledge that has been marginalised by decades of development policy that equated modernisation with the replacement of traditional practices rather than their integration.

The cost of a super El Niño is not only measured in crop yields, GDP points, and fiscal deficits. It is measured in the stories that will not be told because the communities that carry them have been scattered by distress migration. It is measured in the festivals that will not be held because the agricultural surplus that funded them has vanished. It is measured in the step-wells that will crack, the tanks that will silt, the sacred groves that will burn.

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References

1 World Meteorological Organisation. Global Seasonal Climate Update: May 2026. WMO, Geneva, 2026

2 International Research Institute for Climate and Society. May 2026 ENSO Quick Look. Columbia University, 2026.

3 Dr Daniel Swain, climate scientist, University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, quoted in BBC Science Focus Magazine, May 2026.

4 Chen, Z. et al. “Nonlinear El Niño impacts on the global economy under climate change.” Nature Communications, December 2025.

5 Callahan, C.W. and Mankin, J.S. “Persistent effect of El Niño on global economic growth.” Science, Vol. 380, 2023.

6 Chen, Z. et al. “Nonlinear El Niño impacts on the global economy under climate change.” Nature Communications, September 2023.

7 Parthasarathy, B. et al., cited in: “Impact of El Niño onset timing on Indian Monsoon Rainfall patterns.” ScienceDirect / Global and Planetary Change, December 2024.

8 Suresh, R. et al. “El Niño Phenomenon: Impact on India’s Agriculture, Economy, and Mitigation Strategies.” NITI Aayog Reference Paper, 2022.

9 “Super El Niño Explained: What It Could Mean for India’s Monsoon.” Outlook Business, May 2026.

10 Mishra, V. et al. “Drought and Famine in India, 1870–2016.” Geophysical Research Letters, February 2019.

11 McPhaden, Michael J. “El Niño and La Niña: Causes and Global Consequences.” Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, NOAA/PMEL. See also: “El Niño’s Grip on Climate.” Nature Scitable, 2012.

12 “Doji Bara Famine.” Wikipedia, citing Grove, R. and Chappell, J. El Niño: History and Crisis. White Horse Press, 2000. Original meteorological record by William Roxburgh, East India Company, 1792.

13 “El Niño 2026: How It Could Impact India’s Monsoon, Economy and Climate.” Daily Pioneer, May 2026.

14 “El Niño Forecast 2026: Southwest Monsoon and Past El Niño Impacts on India.” Goodreturns, May 2026.

15 “Super El Niño 2026 Threat Grows: Why India Could Face Major Risks.” Business Standard, May 2026.

16 “Super El Niño 2026: Will India Face a Weak Southwest Monsoon and Rainfall Deficit?” Down To Earth, May 1–15, 2026 print edition.

17 Dr Vishwas Chitale, Fellow, Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), quoted in Business Standard, May 2026.

18 “Super El Niño 2026: Impact on India and World.” SPM IAS Academy, May 2026.

19 K.J. Ramesh, former Director General, India Meteorological Department, quoted in Down To Earth, May 2026.

20 Pearson, J., Jackson, G. and McNamara, K.E. “Climate-driven losses to knowledge systems and cultural heritage: A literature review exploring the impacts on Indigenous and local cultures.” One Earth, 2023. Citing: Kaushik and Sharma, 2015.

21 Olorunfemi, I. et al. “Understanding How Indigenous Knowledge Contributes to Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review.” PMC / International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, 2024.

22 World Economic Forum. “Can culture and heritage be catalysts for climate resilience?” WEF Insight Report, November 2025.

23 Royal Geographical Society. “The Societal Responses to El Niño.” RGS Schools Resources, 2024.

24 “Climate Change in Anthropological Theory.” Number Analytics, 2024.

25 UNDP Climate Promise. “Indigenous Knowledge Is Crucial in the Fight Against Climate Change.” 2024. See also: UNESCO-LINKS. Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Climate Change. UNESCO, March 2025.

26 World Economic Forum. “Can culture and heritage be catalysts for climate resilience?” WEF Insight Report, November 2025.