A powerful El Niño climate pattern is developing in the Pacific Ocean, which is expected to affect weather in South Africa in the coming months. The World Meteorological Organization forecasts a probability exceeding 90% that this phenomenon will last at least until November, thereby increasing the risk of extreme heat, drought, and wildfires in regions of South Africa where the summer rainy season occurs.
Within a few days, the South African Weather Service intensified its warning, indicating that the developing phenomenon could become the strongest El Niño on record. Sea surface temperature anomalies already exceed the 2°C threshold that defines a very strong event, and forecasts suggest a possible exceedance of the 3°C mark.
What distinguishes this warning from standard seasonal forecasting is the sharp contrast with previous seasons. The 2024/25 and 2025/26 seasons were unusually favorable: grain and oilseed harvests in South Africa reached 20.3 million tons in the 2025/26 season, only slightly trailing the second-largest harvest of the previous year. Furthermore, reservoir and pasture levels in the region benefited from consecutive rains caused by La Niña events.
However, agricultural economists, including Vandile Sichlobo, cautioned that this buffer only partially compensates for a truly severe El Niño, especially for dryland farming areas lacking irrigation infrastructure. Although forum scientists cautiously presented the forecast as a probabilistic signal rather than an absolute certainty for any specific city or district, the overall regional trend, independently confirmed by meteorological services in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and other countries, leaves no doubt about the direction of developments.
South Africa should not imagine what a very strong El Niño looks like, as the region experienced one a decade ago. The 2015/16 event, which was the last comparable in scale, triggered unprecedented heatwaves and one of the worst droughts in the region's history. This directly contributed to the crisis that led Cape Town to a 'Day Zero' status during 2017–2018, when the city faced several months of potential municipal water cutoffs for four million residents. During that period, Zimbabwe and Zambia declared drought emergencies, maize production in the SADC region was destroyed, and millions needed food aid. SAWS now explicitly references this precedent, warning that warming has continued in the region over the past eleven years, meaning that an event of similar or greater intensity in 2026/27, superimposed on a warmer baseline climate, could cause heatwaves more frequent and intense than those observed in 2015/16.
A positive point is that South Africa does not start from the same institutional position as ten years ago. The near-catastrophe in Cape Town forced investment in increasing water reserves, developing aquifers, and demand management infrastructure, which likely would not have existed without this crisis, and since then, the city has been mentioned internationally as an example of urban drought resilience. At the regional level, SARCOF itself, in its 33rd cycle, has evolved into a truly coordinated early warning mechanism covering national meteorological services. This gives governments, farmers, and disaster management agencies months of advance preparation time, which simply did not exist in the same form in 2015.
This differs significantly from the drought in the Horn of Africa between 2020–2023, when five consecutive failed rainy seasons pushed parts of Somalia toward famine partly because early warnings did not translate into timely and funded action. Whether this will lead to secured harvests and guaranteed water resources now depends on implementation, not forecasting. Reservoir levels before this El Niño are better than in 2015, providing some resilience for irrigated agriculture and urban water systems in the short term. However, rain-fed crops such as maize, sorghum, and peanuts, which form the basis of food security for millions of smallholder farms in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, and rural South Africa, do not have such a buffer, and rising temperatures exacerbate water stress regardless of what is in the reservoirs.
The forecast itself is now essentially defined; what remains truly uncertain is whether the region can translate eleven years of hard-won experience into action before taps and harvests begin to fail, rather than after. SARCOF forecasters strongly urge governments to treat this forecast as a trigger for planning, not as background noise, to prepare drought assistance, protect seed stocks, and strengthen water infrastructure now, while there is still time left in the season.