- The WMO says El Niño is firmly established, is likely to persist through February 2027 and is expected to reach “very strong” intensity towards the end of this year.
- The UK government is preparing a household-resilience campaign, while environment secretary Angela Eagle has advised people to keep enough food and water for several days of disruption.
- This is not a forecast of an imminent British blackout or a deterministic UK winter outlook. The important signal for energy businesses is the increased probability of correlated weather, commodity and infrastructure shocks.
The UK government is preparing to urge households to hold several days of basic supplies as an exceptionally strong El Niño raises the risk of disruptive weather, placing climate adaptation and infrastructure resilience higher on the political agenda.
Environment secretary Angela Eagle said people would be better placed to cope with interruptions to power, water or emergency services if they kept food and water at home.
“If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven’t,” she told the Guardian. The Cabinet Office is expected to launch a broader national emergencies preparedness campaign in the coming months.
The advice followed the World Meteorological Organization’s confirmation that El Niño is firmly established. Its latest consensus forecast puts the probability of the event persisting through February 2027 at nearly 100% and expects it to strengthen to very high intensity before peaking towards the end of 2026.
Weekly sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region had reached about 2.2C to 2.6C above average by mid-August, while subsurface anomalies exceeded 8C in some areas.
“This exceptional El Niño demands exceptional preparation and response,” WMO secretary-general Celeste Saulo said in the organisation’s 3 September statement.
Global signal
Some reports have described the event as potentially the largest in a millennium. That assessment derives from multi-model projections and comparisons with proxy records, rather than an official WMO classification. The WMO’s formulation is “very strong”, and it makes an equally important caveat: the strength of El Niño alone does not determine the severity of impacts in any one country.
El Niño changes ocean and atmospheric circulation in the tropical Pacific, altering the odds of heat, drought and heavy rainfall across the world. Those ‘teleconnections’ vary by season and interact with conditions in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. For the UK, a wetter or stormier period is a risk scenario rather than a certain outcome.
That does not diminish the case for preparation. A strong event can create simultaneous pressures across agricultural regions, shipping routes, hydroelectric systems and electricity demand.
It can influence Asian monsoons, wildfire risk in Australia and Indonesia and flooding in parts of the Americas, with consequences for food prices, commodity flows and humanitarian need even if UK weather remains relatively benign.
For the the UK energy sector, the direct question is whether storms or flooding disrupt networks and whether unusual temperatures change peak demand. The indirect channels may be just as important; poor hydro conditions can tighten power markets elsewhere, weather-driven demand can alter LNG competition and crop losses can add to household inflation at a time when energy affordability remains politically sensitive.
Emergency kits help households through the first days of a disruption, but they cannot substitute for resilient networks, water storage, flood protection, forecasting and response capacity.
