El Niño Awareness is Up, and So Are the SSTs in the Central Pacific

Michael Glantz
Environmental and Societal Impacts Group

A recent Associated Press article noted that "officials in Malaysia are preparing for the possible arrival of El Niño later this year . . .and are launching contingency plans and mitigation measures to avert possible disasters in the future."

No doubt many governments, like Malaysia, and especially their attentive citizens, are more aware of El Niño (and La Niña) now than just five years ago. This steplike shift in awareness represents a great step forward for societies' abilities to cope with El Niño events.

In the highly unlikely case that nothing more were to happen to the learning process about El Niño, what has already been learned in the past few decades has proven to be extremely beneficial and well worth the research efforts.

Governments have learned the hard way that ENSO's extremes can negatively influence development plans and prospects, livelihoods, mortality, morbidity and migration rates around the globe.

In addition to numerous articles on ENSO-related issues, a growing number of books seek to tease out of historical records how El Niño impacted the course of history: was a particular defeat in battle somehow related to El Niño? Did a civilization collapse because of an El Niño-related drought or flood? Did El Niño play a role in colonialism and the "making of the Third World"?

Now a new phase has emerged. It involves the more difficult task of providing detail and convincing potential users of El Niño information to use it (i.e., retailing). It involves putting details into the forecasts that are of concern to a wide range of forecast users, details about timing and magnitude, teleconnections (linkages with distant weather or climatic extreme events), details about its possible impacts on society, environment, and economy.

This phase is a difficult one. It involves "retailing" ENSO information (including, but not limited to, forecasts) to all levels of society, from local to global and to all weather-sensitive socio-economic sectors. There are many sectors of society that can benefit from El Niño information, but the problem is that the number of people who are knowledgeable about ENSO and the use of ENSO information in decision-making is still quite small compared to the task at hand. What to do?

Perhaps those who know about ENSO and what its extremes can do to societies can identify ways to help educate the educators in countries known to be in the El Niño "line of fire" (Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Mozambique, and so forth). That might require developing funding programs that target ENSO education from elementary to post-secondary schools. This would bring a climate dimension to education. We have to start somewhere: why not at the beginning of the educational cycle?

– Michael Glantz