THINK about the last time you left rice on your plate. Now think about the fact that rice prices have just hit their highest (in June 2026) since early 2025, and that the conditions driving those prices are not going away. In fact, they are going to get considerably worse.
A super El Niño is building in the Pacific. Forecasters at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and the Japan Meteorological Agency now put the probability of a moderate-to-strong El Niño establishing by this Northern Hemisphere summer at above 70%. Some models point to an event comparable to the catastrophic episodes of 1982, 1997, and 2015.
This is not a distant scientific abstraction. This is food on your table, water from your tap, air you can or cannot breathe.
The name itself is a reminder that this is not something new. Peruvian fishermen noticed it centuries ago: every few years, around Christmas, the Pacific grew unusually warm, the fish disappeared, and the rains went wrong. They called it El Niño, the “The Boy”.
At its core, it is a natural heartbeat of the ocean: a periodic warming of Pacific waters that reshuffles wind and rain patterns across the globe. A super El Niño is that same rhythm amplified to something dangerous. What has changed is what we have done to the world around it.
Decades of burning fossil fuels have raised our planet’s baseline temperature to levels unprecedented in modern human history.
El Niño has always existed, but humans have turned up the dial. The result is that these events are becoming more frequent, more severe, and harder to predict, not because nature has fundamentally changed, but because we have changed the conditions in which nature operates. This distinction matters enormously because it means what is happening now is, in part, a consequence of choices. And choices can be made differently.
Malaysia is not an innocent bystander in this story. We ranked 28th in the world for greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, comparable with Spain and France but with half the population and a much higher per capita consumption. This is largely due to the fact that our energy system is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels.
Every new oil and gas project we approve today locks in decades of emissions and the conditions that make the next super El Niño worse than this one. I say this not to shame but because the honest reckoning has to happen now, before we are even deeper into the consequences of inaction.
For South-East Asia, El Niño hits us from a particularly cruel angle. When the Pacific warms, rainfall across our region is suppressed. During the last comparable event in 2015 and 2016, more than 70% of South-East Asia’s land area experienced drought, exposing over 200 million people to severe water stress.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, the Philippines and Vietnam face elevated typhoon risk as the Western Pacific season enters its most active phase. Our region does not get a reprieve. It gets drought in some places and catastrophic flooding in others, simultaneously.
This year Malaysia faces an additional burden. A simultaneous positive Indian Ocean Dipole, which is a second climate pattern that reinforces the drying effect, is effectively blocking our monsoon rains. The reservoirs, padi fields, and hydropower plants that Malaysians depend on daily are all exposed at once.
Then there is the Hormuz factor. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the Middle East conflict has already delayed between 1.5 and three million tonnes of fertiliser monthly, affecting at least 40 million hectares of rice globally, with yield reductions of 10% to 20%. Thailand and Vietnam, the world’s second- and third-largest rice exporters, are simultaneously facing drought stress and fertiliser shortages.
These are not separate crises. They are converging, and they are converging now.
So what do we do?
Our academic and research institutions must move faster. Translating climate science into actionable knowledge that farmers in Kedah and Terengganu can actually use is not a secondary task. It is the whole point. Publishing in journals that never reach the front line does not feed anyone.
The fossil fuel industry, and business more broadly, must reckon honestly with the numbers. The economic damage a super El Niño inflicts on agriculture, water, health, and infrastructure already costs far more than a managed transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources would.
Accelerating the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, transitioning to renewable energy, and protecting our ecosystems are not idealistic demands. They are the rational response to what the data is telling us.
And each of us carries real agency – in how much food we waste, in the energy choices we make, in the demands we make of the politicians who represent us.
I have spent my career working in places where crises arrive without warning and take years to recover from. What I see building now is neither invisible nor unpredictable. We are already in the opening chapter of what could be a very difficult second half of this year.
The El Niño developing now is partly natural. The conditions that are making it so dangerous are not. That distinction is not a technicality. It is an invitation.
The question is whether we choose to hear.
Prof Tan Sri Dr Jemilah Mahmood, a physician and experienced crisis leader, is the executive director of the Sunway Centre for Planetary Health at Sunway University. She is the founder of Mercy Malaysia and has served in leadership roles internationally with the United Nations and Red Cross for the last decade. She writes on Planetary Health Matters once a month in Ecowatch. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.
