File image of El Nino (Photo Credits: Wikimedia Commons)
More than 4,50,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño in the next six months, according to estimates by climate scientists. The staggering toll is on top of early deaths resulting from baseline temperatures already driven up by the broader climate crisis. It will strike across the globe, from Indonesia to India, and Nigeria to the US, with many further deaths expected from the droughts, wildfires, and flooding that El Niño cycles bring.
The heat deaths have been estimated at a regional level, and researchers said the projections identify exactly where targeted interventions can be deployed to protect communities and save lives, the Guardian reported. Such actions include enhanced heat forecasting, cooling centres where residents can shelter, increased staffing for healthcare facilities during peak temperature spikes, and statutory protections for outdoor workers. El Nino Triggers Dual Health Crisis in India As WHO Issues High-Risk Alert Over Dengue, Malaria Surge.
'Mind-Blowing' Ocean Heat and Record Temperatures
The El Niño currently heating up the planet burst through the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon on Monday, several months before its expected peak. The heat is so much greater than previous events that scientists have called it “mind-blowing” and “Godzilla-level”. While El Niños are naturally occurring climate phenomena, their intensity is exacerbated by human-induced global heating.
“The estimate of 4,51,000 people is such a large number that it can be numbing, but it is made up of parents and children, grandparents and neighbours, people going to work, caring for families, and living their lives,” said Prof Michael Greenstone, co-founder of the Climate Impact Lab and at the University of Chicago, who co-authored the report. El Nino Strengthens: How It Could Affect India’s Monsoon and Global Weather.
The mortality projections cover the period from September to February 2027, corresponding with current seasonal forecast models. However, scientists cautioned that elevated levels of heat-related fatalities are anticipated to persist until June or July 2027.
Developing Nations and Global South Bear the Heaviest Burden
The countries projected to suffer the highest fatalities over the next six months are tropical nations: Nigeria, Indonesia, Sudan, India, and Brazil. The Sahel region in Africa and Southeast Asia are heavily affected overall. The United States also ranks among the top 20 most affected nations, with an estimated 3,500 additional heat deaths.
The researchers described this super El Niño as a “postcard from our future”, driving temperatures to levels the wider climate crisis is projected to deliver routinely in 20 years’ time.
“Increasing emergency response and better targeting our efforts can save many lives this year,” said report co-author Dr Tamma Carleton at the University of California, Berkeley. “But 20 years from now, once today’s extreme temperatures become the new normal, we don’t want to be in a constant state of emergency.. We need to mobilise now to design, deploy and evaluate the tools that will save lives in the years ahead.”
Empirical Modeling and Compounding Food Security Risks
The projections were developed using peer-reviewed methodologies tracking the month-by-month relationship between ambient temperature and excess heat mortality across 24,378 global regions. This mortality function was combined with forecast temperature anomalies, benchmarked against average monthly heat deaths recorded between 1996 and 2025.
“People have been able to forecast when there’s going to be shocks to crops, and give advance warning of that,” said Greenstone. “This new report is opening the door to being able to do it for an even more important outcome – I would say the most important outcome – which is death.” The report is slated for submission to a peer-reviewed academic journal, but Greenstone noted that the immediate urgency of the hazard made it irresponsible to withhold the findings.
Compounding the crisis, food systems will also face severe disruption. The World Food Programme warned in August that El Niño impacts could push roughly 50 million people into acute hunger while escalating commodity prices. Historical precedents underscore the threat: a major El Niño in 1877–1878 triggered severe droughts and famines that caused more than 50 million deaths, devastating populations in India, Brazil, and China.
Prof Friederike Otto, at Imperial College London, told the Guardian on Monday: “The [current El Niño] event is a huge redistribution of energy in the climate system and is dangerous, because it is unfolding on top of a much warmer, human-influenced climate system. So, in many places around the world we will see never-before-experienced heat extremes, with all their consequences on health, food security and water stress. El Niño comes and goes, but as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, it occurs on an increasingly hotter baseline, making it much more difficult for communities to deal with the consequences.”
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(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Sep 23, 2026 05:52 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
