El Nino

Global funding for the preparation and response to El Niño and the harms it will bring to millions of people is critically insufficient, Oxfam warned today.  

The weather phenomenon is already having a catastrophic impact across much of the world, with wildfires, crop failures and growing severe food and water insecurity. El Niño’s intensity is likely to peak from this month until April next year. Scientists report it could be the strongest on record.  

Oxfam warns that over six million people from farming families in Zambia are facing acute food shortages and malnutrition until next growing season, which is twelve months away, due to a severe drought, exacerbated by climate change and El Nino, which has caused massive crop failures for half of the nation’s “planted area”. 

There is growing scientific analysis suggesting that the impacts of current and recent droughts in East Africa are likely to have been aggravated by climate change. Without global efforts to reduce emissions and to help the world’s poorest people cope with the effects of climate change, this crisis will continue to repeat itself.

Farmer seed systems and community seed banks provide an important safety net for cash-strapped, vulnerable people. They also help small-scale farmers manage climate risk. Supporting them is an adaptation opportunity that is currently being missed.

In Burkina Faso, 80% of the population lives on agriculture and livestock. In one of the poorest countries in the world, the effects of climate change cause even more hunger and threaten the subsistence of the inhabitants. We work so that more than 31,000 families can have access to food, drinking water, and preventative information. Meet some of them.

60 million people are facing a food crisis but the public hasn’t heard about it. It is a global phenomenon but it has not made the headlines because it was a slow, creeping disaster. Learn more about it and take action.

This year’s G20 Summit will raise the stakes for the group to prove itself against growing doubts about its effectiveness – not least for people living in poverty, says Oxfam.

The lingering effects of El Niño have affected around 7 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean. Oxfam and its local partners have been helping some of the most vulnerable people in the region to become more resilient to extreme weather patterns.

The devastating impacts of the 2015–16 El Niño will be felt well into 2017. There is an urgent need for humanitarian action where the situation is already dire, to prepare for La Niña later this year, to commit to new measures to build communities’ resilience, and to mobilize global action to address climate change

As climate talks in Germany wrap up, both poor and rich nations increasingly recognize that fixing the climate change adaptation funding gap, one of the biggest holes in the Paris Agreement, will be a major challenge at the next United Nations conference in Morocco.