El Niño key messages: urgent action now can prevent major suffering and loss
This briefing makes the case to urgently scale up humanitarian response to El Niño 2015-2016 in countries already in crisis. It also draws on the experience of the super El Niño in 1997–98, and the inadequate response to the Horn of Africa drought of 2011, to push for early action to save livelihoods elsewhere.
Millions of poor and vulnerable people face hunger and poverty this year and next because of record global temperatures, droughts and erratic rains in 2014 and 2015, followed by the development of possibly the most powerful El Niño on record.