A powerful El Niño climate pattern is rapidly developing in the Pacific Ocean and is expected to influence South Africa's weather over the coming months. The World Meteorological Organization says there is more than a 90% chance the event will persist until at least November, increasing the risk of extreme heat, drought and veld fires across the country's summer rainfall regions.
Image: IOL
Days later, the South African Weather Service went further, warning that the developing event could become the strongest El Niño in living memory, with sea surface temperature anomalies already exceeding the 2°C threshold that defines a very strong event and forecasts pointing toward a possible breach of 3°C.
Why the Timing Makes This Warning Sharper Than Usual
What distinguishes this warning from routine seasonal forecasting is the swing it represents. The 2024/25 and 2025/26 seasons were unusually generous: South Africa's summer grains and oilseeds crop reached 20.3 million tonnes in 2025/26, only marginally down from the second-largest harvest on record the year before, and dam levels and grazing veld across the region benefited from consecutive years of La Niña-driven rain. That cushion matters, but agricultural economists including Wandile Sihlobo have cautioned it will only partially offset a genuinely severe El Niño, particularly for dryland farming areas without irrigation infrastructure. The forum's own scientists were careful to frame the outlook as a probabilistic signal rather than a locked-in certainty for any single town or district ,but the broad regional pattern, echoed independently by South Africa's, Zimbabwe's and other national weather services, leaves little ambiguity about the direction of travel.
The 2015/16 Precedent Nobody in the Region Has Forgotten
Southern Africa does not have to imagine what a very strong El Niño looks like; it lived through one a decade ago. The 2015/16 event, the last comparable in scale, triggered unprecedented heatwaves and one of the worst droughts in the region's recorded history, contributing directly to the crisis that pushed Cape Town toward "Day Zero" in 2017–2018, when the city came within months of shutting off municipal water taps to four million residents. Zimbabwe and Zambia both declared drought-related states of disaster in that period, maize production across the SADC region collapsed, and millions required food assistance. SAWS has now explicitly invoked that precedent, warning that the region has continued warming in the eleven years since, meaning an event of similar or greater intensity in 2026/27, layered onto a hotter baseline climate, could produce heatwaves more frequent and more severe than anything experienced in 2015/16.
A Region That Has Learned Some Lessons, Not All of Them
The encouraging counterpoint is that Southern Africa is not starting from the same institutional position it held a decade ago. Cape Town's near-miss forced a generation of water-augmentation investment, aquifer development and demand-management infrastructure that likely would not exist without that crisis, and the city has since been cited internationally as a case study in urban drought resilience. Regionally, SARCOF itself , now in its 33rd iteration has matured into a genuinely coordinated early-warning mechanism spanning national meteorological services, giving governments, farmers and disaster-management agencies months of lead time that simply did not exist in the same form in 2015. That is meaningfully different from, for instance, the Horn of Africa's 2020–2023 drought, where five consecutive failed rainy seasons pushed parts of Somalia toward famine-level conditions partly because early warnings did not translate into early, funded action.
Whether that translates into protected harvests and secured water supplies now depends on execution rather than forecasting. Reservoir levels heading into this El Niño are healthier than they were in 2015, which buys some resilience for irrigated agriculture and urban water systems in the short term. But rain-fed maize, sorghum and groundnut farming, the backbone of food security for millions of smallholder households across Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and rural South Africa, has no such buffer, and above-normal temperatures compound water stress regardless of what is sitting in a dam. The forecast itself is now essentially settled; what remains genuinely uncertain is whether the region converts eleven years of hard-won experience into action before, rather than after, the taps and the harvests start to fail. SARCOF's forecasters have urged governments to treat the outlook as a planning trigger rather than background noise, pre-positioning drought relief, protecting seed stocks, and shoring up water infrastructure now, while there is still a season of lead time left on the clock.
Written by:
*Dr Iqbal Survé
Past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN
*Sesona Mdlokovana
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Africa Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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