IWMI Launches ENSO Outlook Tool to Turn El Niño Forecasts Into Early Action

Colombo: The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has launched a new digital tool, the ENSO Outlook, designed to convert El Niño climate forecasts into timely, actionable guidance for governments, farmers, and institutions facing the phenomenon’s mounting impacts. The tool was unveiled on June 18 during the 2026 El Niño Webinar, as part of a broader effort to help vulnerable nations prepare for a developing El Niño event that scientists warn could disrupt food and water systems well into early 2027.

The ENSO Outlook represents a significant advance in climate risk communication, integrating a wide array of El Niño-related data, including rainfall patterns, soil moisture levels, and vegetation health, and applying artificial intelligence to translate these signals into forecasts of their likely effects on water resources, agriculture, food systems, and rural livelihoods.

A Tool Built for Multi-Level Decision-Making

Unlike conventional forecasting products, the ENSO Outlook is designed to present data across multiple scales, from global overviews down to national-level detail, enabling governments to identify targeted preparatory actions tailored to their specific circumstances. According to IWMI, this scalability is intended to help unlock access to critical support mechanisms, including farming services, agricultural insurance, and emergency finance, before climate shocks fully materialize.

Todd Rosenstock, Director of the CGIAR Climate Action Program, which supports the initiative alongside IWMI, emphasized that the tool’s core purpose is to ensure forecasts translate into concrete decisions. He noted that the ENSO Outlook is intended to help countries and partners convert seasonal forecasts into earlier and better-informed decisions that protect food systems, water resources, and vulnerable communities.

El Niño’s Widening Regional Impact

Current scientific forecasts indicate that the developing El Niño event threatens to bring severe droughts and erratic rainfall patterns affecting crops and livestock through early 2027, intensifying existing concerns over global food security. East and Southern Africa are projected to face some of the most severe impacts, with forecasts pointing to below-average rainfall, localized flooding, and extreme heat occurring across different areas, conditions that risk compounding existing vulnerabilities such as ongoing conflict, elevated fuel and fertilizer prices, and fragile recovery from previous weather shocks.

Latin America and the Caribbean, along with South and Southeast Asia, are also identified as regions likely to experience significant El Niño-related disruption, underscoring the phenomenon’s broad geographic reach and its capacity to simultaneously strain multiple vulnerable regions across different continents.

Giriraj Amarnath, research group leader on Water Data for Climate Resilience and principal researcher on Disaster Risk Management and Climate Resilience at IWMI, described El Niño as extending far beyond a purely climatic concern, characterizing it instead as a global risk multiplier capable of driving cascading effects across rainfall patterns, drought and flood risk, heat stress, crop production, water availability, food security, and livelihoods in already vulnerable regions.

Beyond Crops: Livestock, Fisheries, and One Health

While cereal crops typically dominate food security discussions, the report accompanying the tool’s launch stresses that El Niño’s potential impacts on livestock, fisheries, and aquaculture deserve far greater attention than they typically receive. Losses in animal and aquatic food sources are often among the first areas where poor households experience nutritional and income cuts, yet these losses tend to be systematically undercounted in disaster response planning.

Small-scale fisheries alone account for roughly 40 percent of the world’s wild-caught fish and provide essential nutrients to more than 2.3 billion people globally, underscoring the scale of what stands to be disrupted. Satellite-based livestock and fisheries insurance, which uses earth-observation data to help verify claims, was highlighted as one protective mechanism, though such systems require complementary social protection schemes to ensure affected households can afford ongoing premiums.

The report also points to the value of applying a “One Health” approach, which seeks to balance the health of people, animals, and ecosystems together. Given that extreme weather can compromise livestock immunity, this approach may involve enhanced disease monitoring and the establishment of targeted vaccination programmes in at-risk areas.

From Forecasting to Funded, Pre-Agreed Action

A recurring theme among experts involved in the initiative is that improved forecasting capability alone is insufficient without mechanisms to ensure forecasts actually trigger timely responses. Anna Okello, Director of the CGIAR Food Frontiers and Security Science Program, noted that while forecasting climate shocks has become increasingly effective, the central challenge lies in ensuring that forecasts activate pre-agreed actions, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities among partners that are funded in advance of impacts occurring, rather than after.

This challenge is particularly acute in the many El Niño-affected countries that are already highly fragile or serve as recurring crisis hotspots. In these contexts, experts stress that climate risk forecasting alone is not enough; understanding how weather shocks interact with existing conflict dynamics, weak governance institutions, and pre-existing food insecurity is essential. Addressing these compounded risks requires triangulating climate and non-climate data to identify priority hotspots, tailoring scientific outputs to the specific needs of policymakers, and investing in local partnerships to build trust and ensure interventions are effectively implemented.

Oscar Ortiz, Director of the CGIAR Sustainable Farming Program, pointed to Peru as an example of a region with direct experience of El Niño’s effects, noting that access to real-time scientific monitoring, combined with collaborative work across organizations spanning both the Global North and South, now offers new possibilities for anticipatory response that were not previously available.

Background: CGIAR’s Push for Anticipatory Climate Action

The launch of the ENSO Outlook forms part of a broader shift within the international development and climate science community toward anticipatory action, an approach that prioritizes acting on forecasts before disasters fully unfold, rather than responding only after impacts have already occurred. This approach has gained significant traction over the past decade as evidence has mounted that early intervention, guided by reliable forecasting, can substantially reduce humanitarian and economic losses compared to traditional post-disaster response models.

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation is a naturally occurring climate pattern involving periodic warming of sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, which in turn influences weather patterns across much of the globe. El Niño events have historically been associated with significant disruptions to agricultural production, water availability, and food security in vulnerable regions, with past occurrences linked to severe droughts in parts of Africa and Asia, as well as flooding in parts of the Americas.

IWMI, a CGIAR research center headquartered in Colombo, Sri Lanka, has long focused on water resource management and climate resilience research across the developing world. The development of the ENSO Outlook builds on this institutional expertise, combining it with the CGIAR Climate Action Program’s broader mandate to translate scientific research into practical tools that support food, land, and water system resilience.

By integrating artificial intelligence with diverse climate and environmental datasets, the ENSO Outlook reflects a growing trend within international development institutions toward leveraging advanced technology to close the gap between scientific forecasting capability and on-the-ground decision-making, particularly in regions where the human and economic stakes of climate variability remain highest.