In the coming months, El Niño is expected to worsen drought, flood, heat, and storm conditions around the world. Despite its potential to amplify existing vulnerabilities and crises, there has been a lack of policymaking and preparation to counter the potential impacts. While some drier regions, like the Middle East, could actually benefit from El Niño effects such as heavy rain in arid areas, other places face undeniable danger from extreme heat, “weather whiplash,” and unpredictable storms.  

The Global Water Security Center (GWSC) works at the intersection of cutting-edge research, critical data, and global climate security policy. A public service center located at The University of Alabama, they work to provide reliable, ground-breaking research to stimulate “appropriate action and response by the United States.” Thus, as international media latches onto terms like “Super El Niño” and “Godzilla,” a recent report from GWSC dives deeper into the potential impacts of El Niño on food supply. By breaking down various regions and specific crop disruptions, a clear picture is painted of what risks need to be addressed. 

I recently spoke with Penny Beames, a Human-Environmental Analyst at GWSC, to discuss the organization’s role in turning data into coherent, actionable reports that inform policymaking and increase global preparedness.  

Anwen Williams: Tell us about the Global Water Security Center – how do you help decision-makers prepare for events like El Niño?  

Penny Beames: The Global Water Security Center is a scientific resource for the US Federal Government with a focus on security issues and civil instability associated with water and weather challenges, including those that cascade through food and energy. We’re based out of the University of Alabama and routinely work with professional and academic partners from across the world.   

We help decision-makers prepare for events like El Niño by interpreting forecasts for heat, floods, and drought and drawing out how these conditions affect social and economic circumstances. For instance, we know that El Niño drought across India can have a negative impact on the country’s main wheat-growing regions, which affects both local livelihoods and global wheat prices. So we watch the forecast to assess the potential severity of the drought, and then integrate those projections with known issues, like India’s wheat export bans, to estimate impacts on wider food trade.  

We know decision-makers have to make big choices on short timelines, so we prioritize plain language descriptions and specific implications to make our products as digestible as possible. 

Williams: Water security touches nearly every sector, making it a particularly challenging policy issue. How does GWSC synthesize tools like seasonal forecasting, historic climate patterns, and crop yield data into something coherent and actionable? How have you effectively presented this data to policymakers?  

Beames: We use a lot of geospatial data and focus on presenting it clearly. We’ll overlay water data with crops, cities, power plants, natural resources—major elements of any societal system. Then we integrate weather and climate forecasts to see where overlaps might cause problems, and we look at where they have caused problems in the past. In Taiwan, we found El Niño-driven heat and drought caused competition between semi-conductor factories and farmers who grow crops nearby, and that competition affected local food security. El Niño drought in Brazil drives wildfire risk, which has implications for cash and staple crops as well as industry and urban economic engines.    

Our analysis teams always have a social analyst, a data scientist, and a cartographer to ensure we’re looking at problems from multiple angles. And our cartography team does beautiful work to make sure findings aren’t just visible; they’re compelling to look at. Our maps really draw people in. 

We’ve found that using analogues—comparable examples from the past—makes it much easier for policymakers to understand what the future could look like. We’ll point to the Rio Grande do Sul floods in the 2024 El Niño as an example of possible impacts to Brazil’s soy production, or the drought in Java, Indonesia in El Niño 2016 and its effects on rice.  

Even if future events are projected to be stronger or more intense than in the past, having a reference point with quantifiable impacts and qualitative descriptions makes an amplified future more imaginable. 

Williams: Turning now specifically to GWSC’s recent El Niño analysis, as global media has increased its coverage of El Niño, what is missing? What does your analysis surface that isn’t getting adequate attention, and why do those gaps in public understanding matter for how decision-makers prepare?  

Beames: A strong El Niño does not guarantee strong impacts everywhere. Yes, there are broad temperature and rainfall patterns associated with El Niño. But global weather systems are dynamic, and exceptions will inevitably show up. The actual forecast will help gauge the intensity of heat, flood, and drought in the regions more likely to be the hardest hit.   

El Niño is also occasionally used as a scapegoat for mismanagement. Places that El Niño patterns don’t typically reach may blame the weather for power blackouts or empty irrigation canals. With all the mis- and dis-information about weather and climate, it’s so important to assign responsibility to El Niño only where it’s appropriate and be honest when management issues are the real drivers behind livelihood impacts.   

Williams: In your recent analysis on the potential impacts of El Niño on global crop production, there were very varied impacts; increased rain in one area would improve crop yield while simultaneously increasing flood risk, while drought in another region would pose an undeniable threat to the agricultural industry. How should policymakers be using this varied picture to anticipate global food price shocks and protect import-dependent populations?  

Beames: The words being used to describe this El Niño can inspire a lot of panic. Hearing that a “Godzilla” El Niño is bearing down on us will definitely make the heart pump faster. But panic makes for terrible policy.  

We used data from the Food and Agriculture Organization to analyze annual staple crop production trends from the 1997-1998 strong El Niño through to 2024. When combined, rice, wheat, soy, and maize production actually saw bumps during El Niño years. Granted those bumps weren’t evenly distributed. Rice goes down while soy goes up, maize gets a boost in the United States but gets hit in the Horn of Africa. And these numbers don’t account for food needs met by fresh produce, backyard gardens, and subsistence farming. But they tell us that there is enough food if we distribute it right.  

Humans can hoard in a crisis. Look at toilet paper during Covid. But we can also make policy choices to mitigate that impulse. Knowing we tend to have enough food even during strong El Niños, we can make sure staple foods get traded to the countries that really need it and not just the highest bidders. 

Williams: The compounding impacts of extreme weather — where floods, crop failures, supply disruptions, and political tensions interact in ways that outpace conventional early warning systems — represent a significant analytical challenge. What types of anticipatory action have proven most effective in GWSC’s research?  

Beames: Trying to conceptualize complex systems as a whole is overwhelming. We came up with the Pathways to Instability Framework to help parse these kinds of interactions into disturbances, biophysical impacts, and social outcomes. The framework prioritizes simplicity, so it intentionally sets aside details and complex history, but in doing so it reveals sets of conditions that tend to lead to civil unrest.   

An example from social science literature that shows up in our work is how drought can compel farmers to switch from food to illicit crops. Here, the disturbance is drought. Biophysical impacts are water shortages that lead to crop losses and cascade into livelihood impacts. Because crops like coca or poppy tend to be hardier, farmers turn to them to shore up cash. Cartels can leverage the switch to increase their wealth and status, so the social implications include increased societal and political instability.   

Once these basic interactions are established, analysts can layer on antecedent conditions like institutional strength, history of conflict, or systemic inequalities to build complexity back into the system.   

From an anticipatory perspective, breaking issues and interactions down to their constituent parts helps to circumvent the overwhelm. Using the framework, we can look for common patterns that lead to unrest, like how floods can lead to protest, or how disturbances of any kind can facilitate rebel recruitment in areas with non-state violent actor groups. These patterns aren’t guaranteed to produce unrest, but they point to places to watch. 

Penny Beams is a Human-Environmental Analyst at the University of Alabama’s Global Water Security Center, where she examines how water and environmental disturbances intersect with social conditions to produce instability at national and regional levels. She has conducted more than 25 assessments with GWSC with a regional specialization in Russia, Asia, and Oceania.

Anwen Williams is an intern in the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program.

Sources: Global Water Security Center; European Union Joint Research Centre; Associated Press 

Photo Credits: Licensed by Adobe Stock.