SEVERAL weeks of persistent rains and flooding, mostly in Luzon but also affecting other areas of the Philippines, have revealed that the government remains woefully unprepared to respond to the effects of El Niño, despite nearly a year’s worth of reliable warnings that the periodic climate phenomenon will occur and is likely to be more intense than usual. The worst effects of El Niño are still to come, and will not be solved by the government giving mere lip service to the possibility of adverse impacts, and then reacting to them late and in an inadequate way.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon characterized by a warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, which disrupts global weather patterns. El Niño returns every two to seven years and typically lasts about 12 months; the current event began in June–July of this year, is expected to peak in intensity around Christmas, and persist until at least March or April of next year, possibly longer. While the phenomenon is natural, it is being intensified by anthropogenic climate warming, meaning that future events are likely to be more severe than what we are beginning to experience now.
What we have seen with the recent rains matches the typical weather pattern caused by El Niño. The normal typhoon track shifts northward, meaning that the country is directly impacted by fewer tropical storms — although those that do strike the Philippines tend to be stronger than normal — but the southwest monsoon (habagat) is intensified, resulting in heavy rains and flooding. Later in the year and into the first couple of months of 2027, we can expect hotter than normal temperatures and persistent drought conditions.
Although El Niño may be aggravated by climate change, it is not itself a natural disaster, but an event that can be forecast with enough time to prepare for potential hazards that are already well understood.
The biggest impacts of El Niño are on food security, something that is already tenuous here in the Philippines, and the economic well-being of farmers. Failed harvests and livestock losses lead to higher food prices, lower incomes for the farming sector, rising household debt, and increased sovereign debt from funding reactionary disaster response and short-term social support programs. And El Niño is arriving at a time when food security is already strained by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused higher fuel prices and severe disruption to supply chains for fertilizers and other agricultural inputs. The World Food Program has already warned that El Niño could push an additional 8.2 million people across Asia and the Pacific into “acute food insecurity” by the middle of next year, more than half of those in this country.
The agricultural losses from the recent and in some important farming areas, such as Pampanga, still ongoing flooding simply indicate that one of the most important lessons from past El Niño events has yet to be understood by the government: Despite it being a forecastable event, the impacts are still treated as a surprise, and we pay for the response instead of the preparation.
Not only is it an inefficient and inadequate approach, it is economically wasteful. Analyses by institutions such as the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank — whom the government inevitably runs to for external support for calamity response — show that every dollar spent on preemptive crisis preparation saves between $5 and $7 in emergency response.
And it is not as if the current administration does not know how to do this. In a program supported by the ADB and other international partners, the government acted ahead of the 2023–2024 El Niño drought period to support farmers in Isabela, using existing social welfare registries such as the 4Ps program to distribute cash assistance and farming inputs ahead of the worst effects of the season. In another example from elsewhere in the region, the government of Laos earlier this year created a pilot insurance scheme, which will release additional funds for farmers when the drought index reaches a defined threshold, so that they can cushion the effects of intensifying conditions.
The government has already missed the boat — pun intended — on the first predictable stage of the El Niño season, the increased rainfall and flooding, but it still has a chance to prepare for the second stage, the impending drought. Offering the public reassurances that response plans are in place is not the answer; those plans need to be forward-looking, and put into action now.
