Scientists are warning that an emerging “Super El Niño” weather event could affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide as it strengthens through 2026 and peaks in winter. Researchers say the impacts could alter ecosystems for decades, as happened with previous powerful El Niño episodes. The phenomenon — a natural climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean — is expected to bring extreme weather across multiple continents.
The warning dovetails with a sobering new report from the World Meteorological Organization, which found that Latin America and the Caribbean lack the basic systems needed to even count how many people die from extreme heat. The report, The State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean 2025, presented in Brasilia, documented record-breaking climate disasters across the region — from torrential floods in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela to Hurricane Melissa devastating Jamaica with losses exceeding 4% of GDP. The gap between the severity of climate impacts and the region’s capacity to measure them is, the WMO warned, itself a crisis.
