FAO maps out El Niño regions, readies actions to reduce risks
ROME—The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is mapping out the areas in the globe that are especially vulnerable to El Niño and preparing actions that could be taken to mitigate its risks.
The FAO noted that the protracted threeyear presence of La Niña is leaving the global atmospheric scene and is making way for a likely imminent transition to El Niño, a meteorological event that typically distributes weather patterns in the opposite way.
La Niña has brought relief for some drought-afflicted areas such as the Horn of Africa, but the opposite weather phenomenon could spell trouble for other parts of Africa, Central America and Far East Asia.
According to a new report by FAO, Southern Africa, Central America and the Caribbean and parts of Asia are of particular concern, as a number of countries in these regions already face high levels of acute food insecurity and key cropping seasons fall under the typical El Niño weather patterns of drier conditions.
Northern areas of South America are also at risk to potential dryness, while Australia normally experiences suppressed rainfall.
“Early warnings mean that we have to take early and anticipatory action, and we will support our Members in these efforts, to the full extent resources allow,” said Rein Paulsen, head of FAO’s Office for Emergencies and Resilience.
In the wake of the El Niño episode of 2015 and 2016, which affected over 60 million people in around 23 countries, FAO has carefully worked with membernations–including many of those where food security is likely to be impacted by the coming El Niño–and other UN agencies to establish action plans and protocols.
Standard operating procedures have been crafted to expedite timely interventions such as setting up community seed stores, assessing strategic food reserves and bolstering animal health surveillance campaigns.
FAO has developed anticipatory action protocols for drought in Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, southern Madagascar, Malawi, Zimbabwe, the Philippines, Pakistan and in Central America, and is ready to act early should the forecasts materialize.
Given the most recent forecasts that have raised the likelihood of an El Niño event occurring from June onwards, FAO is already setting in motion initial preparations to support affected countries.
“Forecasts at this point are clear but inevitably can only be put forth with low confidence due to their low power during the May-June-July period,” explained Oscar Rojas, FAO agro-meteorologist.
El Niño events typically occur every two to seven years, with La Niña episodes and neutral conditions filling the years in-between. Catalyzed by a warming of Pacific Ocean waters, El Niño has a major influence on temperature and precipitation patterns over many parts of the world, driving extreme weather events including drought, flooding and storms.
While El Niño events and impacts are never alike, the broadly typical patterns enhance predictable regional consequences. FAO’s approach has been to map changes in vegetation conditions across the globe’s croplands and combine this analysis with crop calendars to better understand how rainfall deficits may affect production—the effects of water stress vary throughout a crop’s life cycle. This approach helps identify areas at higher risk, or those where dry conditions impact the entire crop cycle, and guides the type of interventions that should be implemented.
Under the standard operating procedures for early action to El Niño/La Niña episodes by the UN Interagency Standing Committee, anticipatory action initiatives advance in step with the likelihood that an El Niño event is brewing. FAO, OCHA and the WMO together with other partners are monitoring the situation to determine the countries at highest risk later in the year.
While rain will be a welcome relief to farmers in Argentina and Near East Asia, El Niño can also cause severe flooding, which can harm agriculture and increase the risk of disease. That’s a particular risk FAO has examined in relation to East Africa, which has faced four years of extreme rainfall deficits and where recovery will at any rate take a long time even if rainfall finally returns.
Australia, Brazil and South Africa, all major cereal producers and exporters, are among the countries at risk of dry conditions, as are a host of other countries in Central and West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.
The inverse risk of excessive rainfall holds for exporters such as Argentina, Turkey and the United States of America, as well as for countries in Central Asia.
El Niño typically raises the global average temperature and was associated with the record high registered in 2016, when various carbon-releasing calamities occurred, including forest and peatland fires in Indonesia and billions of trees decimated by drought in the Amazon.