All eyes on El Niño: "risk-multiplier" event may threaten up to $11trn in losses
Report 1: State of Climate in 2026 report
Launched at COP 31, the World Meteorological Organisations State of the Climate Update report shows the global average surface temperature for 2026 was about 1.47 °Celsius above the pre-industrial average. It also found that the past 12 years have individually been the warmest on record, with the past four years being the top four.
"El Niño and indeed the state of the global climate in 2026 gives new meaning to the phrase off the charts,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.
"We are supercharging our weather and El Niño will be a risk multiplier. Heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and rainstorms are intensifying faster than our historical baselines prepared us for. Hundreds of millions of people this year have been exposed to unbearable extreme heat, whilst the catastrophic ice and rock collapse and flash floods in Nepal highlighted the compound risks facing communities in fragile, warming high-mountain terrain.”
Read the report here:
WMO: State of the climate in 2026 report*
Report 2: United Nations Food Stress report
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a United Nations agency and international financial institution focused on rural economies, released their latest report, Food systems under stress: Building resilience from the first mile, on 9 November 2026.
The report identifies El Niño as one of many overlapping climate and economic shocks hitting small-scale food producers and rural economies. IFAD's $11 trillion estimate for the current El Niño accounted for direct impact on agricultural economies and wider disruption to infrastructure, commodity markets, consumer demand and global trade.
"Resilience is not built by investing in single interventions, but by connecting investments in inputs, markets and finance so that gains in one area are not lost in another,” said Alvaro Lario, President of IFAD.
"Where we have invested in these pillars together, the results are transformational: incomes have increased more than 40 per cent, nearly all households report gains, and technology adoption is up by three-quarters.”
In tandem, the reports coming out of COP 31 reveal a series of physical and systemic risks that call for boards to address long-term dependencies as the climate continues to change, prioritising resilience in the face of severe headwinds. It is likely that scenarios that envision climate hazards, energy prices and geopolitical shocks as separate entities or rely on historical data will overlook second-order effects and understate losses. And yet, opportunity can be discovered when an organisation looks beyond single interventions and connects investments to target their most vulnerable pillars.
*The final State of the Global Climate 2026 report will be issued in March 2027, incorporating scientific contributions from dozens of National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, regional climate centres, United Nations partners and experts from the WMO community.
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