Meteorologists are predicting that an exceptionally strong El Niño will likely form in 2026. If past events are any indication, the impacts on coffee could be profound.
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Meteorologists are predicting that an exceptionally strong El Niño will likely form in 2026. If past events are any indication, the impacts on coffee could be profound.
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Coffee is a particular plant. It grows best within a relatively narrow latitude range around the equator, at elevation, and relies on specific climate conditions to thrive.
Arabica, which accounts for around 70% of all coffee produced today, is especially sensitive, and is best suited to a temperature range of 18°–21°C (64°–70°F). Robusta, while able to tolerate higher temperatures, isn’t, well, as robust as previously thought. For both species, consistent rainfall is essential, as is a predictable dry season that coincides with harvest. Too much or too little rain at the wrong time can impact flowering and fruit development, and thus lead to lower yields.
Farmers need stability, consistency, and predictability from the climate in order to supply the world with coffee and put food on their tables. But as the climate crisis worsens, that stability has become much more elusive.
It might not be a great time to mention, then, that meteorologists are predicting another El Niño this year. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climate pattern that forms in the Pacific Ocean every two to seven years. El Niño is characterised by a rise in ocean temperatures and a shift in the Pacific jet stream, which can impact weather globally. Its effect on coffee production varies depending on location, but previous instances of the phenomenon have brought extreme drought, heatwaves, and flooding to coffee-growing regions.
2026 isn’t just forecast to be an El Niño year, however—according to current predictions, it could be especially strong, a “super” El Niño. As the BBC reports, there have only been a handful of such events in the last 75 years, and this year’s El Niño may surpass previous records. Its impacts would also likely stretch into 2027, which scientists expect could be the hottest year on record.
If the event breaks records, as predicted, it will likely spawn a cascade of climate disruptions around the globe. Is there anything the industry can do now to help farmers weather the storm?
A Domino Effect
ENSO is a three-part cycle. It begins with El Niño, the warming phase; then a neutral phase in between; and finally La Niña, the cooling phase. There is evidence of ENSO-like occurrences going back millions of years, and the phenomenon has been linked to various historical crises, such as the downfall of the Moche civilisation in what is now Peru. Modern-era El Niño events have had extreme impacts around the world, including exposing billions to extended drought, wildfires, floods, and overall higher temperatures.
“In the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, occasionally the ocean temperature in that area can get warmer than average, which is El Niño”, explains Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist and media director at Climate Central. “That little change can basically jumble up the way the entire tropical atmosphere works by shifting where thunderstorm activity tends to form in the tropics. That’s like the first domino that falls, and that’s how you affect the climate and the weather further off the equator”.
El Niño’s effects are not always predictable, and vary by location. “The most consistent patterns you’ll see are mainly impacts on precipitation”, Di Liberto says. El Niño tends to create drier and hotter conditions in Southeast Asia, Central America, and northern South America, he explains, while southern Brazil can receive more rainfall than normal. In Africa, the effects can be more inconsistent, but previous El Niños have brought heavy rain and floods to Kenya and drought to Ethiopia. All of these regions are, of course, key areas of coffee production.
An El Niño beginning in 2026 is now considered likely. The World Meteorological Organization issued a press release on June 2 saying there is an 80–90% chance of it forming this summer, fueled by warming ocean waters in the Pacific. Most forecast models, the WMO notes, predict that it will be at least moderate, and possibly strong. The United States Climate Prediction Center gives a 67% chance of a strong or very strong (or super) El Niño developing by the end of the year.
In general, Di Liberto explains, El Niño tends to develop over the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, peak during the autumn and winter, and recede by the following spring. The strength of a particular El Niño—“Not surprisingly, ‘super’ is not a scientific term”, he says—doesn’t mean that its specific impacts are necessarily more extreme; sometimes they’re just more prolonged.
What makes the prospect of a strong El Niño in 2026 worrying for climate scientists and researchers is that it could have an exacerbating effect. Rising temperatures and extreme weather events already threaten the lives and livelihoods of billions. Di Liberto points out that the last El Niño that began in 2023 led to record-high temperatures in 2024. This potential upheaval additionally comes at a time of concurrent agricultural crises, such as the fertiliser and fuel shortage caused by the war in Iran, which are already affecting the global food system.
The impact will be felt especially by those in the Global South, including many coffee farmers, who are already food-insecure. The United Nations and other organisations are now warning that El Niño “could push more families into vulnerability by triggering drought conditions” in Central America.
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El Niño’s Complex Impact on Coffee
Beyond these broad-scale agricultural and climate outcomes, predicting El Niño’s specific impact on coffee is difficult. Because coffee production is dispersed around the globe, each region experiences very different effects.
Past ENSO events have been linked to lower coffee harvests in some countries. For example, in 2024, Brazil’s harvest was smaller than anticipated due to “a lack of rain and above-normal temperatures, worsened by the effects of El Niño”, as a USDA report noted. Nicaragua’s 2023–24 harvest fell by 10% for similar reasons.
But El Niño is a complex phenomenon, and its impacts aren’t only destructive. In other countries, outcomes have been more positive: Colombia, for example, benefited from what Sucafina described as “increased sun exposure, leading to a 10% production increase” in 2024. However, the trader also reported lower coffee quality due to higher temperatures and a lack of water.
El Niño’s impacts vary by country, and can even differ within the same country. El Niño often brings drought to Indonesia, which can lower coffee yields—but in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra, the rainfall caused by La Niña is often a bigger problem, as farmer and agronomist Tovan Marhennata explains. “Gayo is a wet area”, he says, and during the 2018 La Niña event “our harvest was small because of the high intensity of the rain”. By contrast, he says, in his region the drier weather brought by El Niño generally improves coffee flowering.
In Colombia, the effects of El Niño can also be hugely variable, says Eduardo Duque-Dussán, a research scientist and head of engineering at Cenicafé, Colombia’s national coffee research centre. Colombia’s growing regions are diverse in terms of altitude, shade cover, soil types, and rainfall patterns. Because of this range, “a moderate El Niño can have some positive effects”, Duque-Dussán says.
In areas that usually get plenty of precipitation, decreased rainfall due to El Niño can improve flowering, while reduced humidity can help prevent diseases like coffee leaf rust. A farm’s production system can also help: Coffee grown under shade better copes with increased temperatures, Duque-Dussán explains. The problem, he says, comes when El Niño is especially strong or prolonged—which is exactly what meteorologists expect this year.
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While a regular El Niño can mess with coffee production, a supercharged version of the phenomenon is likely to have more pronounced, even devastating, impacts, on coffee and beyond. The strongest El Niño on record occurred in 1877 and 1878, and a resulting global famine led to the deaths of more than 50 million people.
More recently, the 1997–98 El Niño, also considered one of the strongest ever, was responsible for the deaths of around 21,000 people globally. Coffee crops in Ecuador and Costa Rica were damaged, while droughts and forest fires affected Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brazil. A 1998 report from the International Coffee Organization laid bare the unpredictable outcomes for coffee, even in neighbouring countries. Guatemala, for example, experienced a 22.6% decline in production that year, while El Salvador (5.6%) and Honduras (14.8%) both saw increases. Additionally, the report noted, “it is to be feared that weather anomalies will affect coffee yields and quality in crop year 1998/99”.
The most recent super El Niño occurred between 2015–16, and also had severe impacts on many coffee-producing regions. Drought in Brazil’s Espirito Santo state led to an almost 40% fall in the country’s robusta production, while Vietnam’s harvest declined by 7% in 2016, at least in part due to extended hot weather triggered by El Niño.
In Ethiopia, meanwhile, an El Niño-caused drought resulted in widespread crop failures and food insecurity across the country. In 2016, more than 10 million people needed food assistance, Relief Web reported. While not all coffee-growing areas were impacted—the USDA reported no drop in overall production that year—certain regions were hit hard.
A team of researchers published a paper in 2019, which examined how the 2015–16 El Niño affected smallholder coffee farmers around Ethiopia’s Yayu Coffee Forest Biosphere Reserve. In 2015, farmers saw lower yields than the previous year, “but by 2016 we saw this complete collapse”, says lead author Alexandra Morel, then at the Zoological Society of London. This was due to shifting rainfall patterns at key points in the growing season. “Without the rains, the coffee shrubs don’t produce that many flowers, and then the potential for berries to develop is also limited”, she says. Farmers’ income from coffee fell accordingly, by as much as 30% compared to the year before.
How Can Coffee Farmers Prepare for El Niño?
If forecasts are correct, and a strong-to-very-strong El Niño does occur this year, coffee farmers do still have some ways to prepare. “I think that a take-home message is not panic but preparation”, Duque-Dussán says. “Colombian coffee growers are used to dealing with climate variability, but a strong El Niño would require closer monitoring and better timing for farm and agricultural practices”.
Several people I spoke to mentioned shade and soil as being important factors to dealing with El Niño, but also with climate change in general. Colombian farmer Roberto Samuel Ulloa says that his region has seen higher average temperatures in recent years, and that working in an agroforestry system helps alleviate these pressures. At the same time, “shade trees do not only provide shade”, he says. “They protect coffee plants against wind, against hail, against excessive rain storms” that events like El Niño can bring.
The type of shade tree may also be important to protect against climate shocks. Morel, now at Dundee University in Scotland, led an updated study in 2024 looking at how shade impacted yields in Ethiopia’s Yayu Biosphere Reserve between 2014–16. While El Niño led to lower yields across the study area, those farms that featured leguminous (or nitrogen-fixing) shade trees fared the best. “Without addition of chemical fertilisers, nitrogen-fixing vegetation remains an important method for adding nutrients to this system, which we assume is driving the observed benefit to yields”, the researchers wrote.
What an upcoming El Niño might do to coffee prices remains to be seen, but its impact on large coffee producers like Brazil and Vietnam will be key. In general, the coffee futures market is highly responsive to fluctuations in weather. Unexpected frost or drought in Brazil, for example, can send the C price soaring if there’s a chance it might impact the harvest there. Studies have shown that ENSO events can influence the price of coffee: A 2025 study in Vietnam found that “the ENSO phenomenon has a significant impact on Vietnam’s coffee export price, with El Niño reducing price and La Niña tending to increase price”.
There’s still a chance, although it is decreasing, that this year’s El Niño turns out to be a damp squib, or doesn’t happen at all. If predictions are correct and it is as fierce as some think, the impacts could be widespread—although exactly who will be impacted, and by how much, remains hard to predict. Some farmers may even benefit.
However, Di Liberto notes that the potential consequences will be worse for those least able to respond. “It’s a big difference if an extreme happens, let’s say, in the United States or in Europe, than if it happens across Eastern Africa”, he says. “El Niño really amplifies the impacts along the tropics in those regions, [and] it puts a lot of vulnerable regions at risk”.
What the threat of a “super” El Niño and past ENSO events demonstrate is just how dependent coffee is on stable and consistent climate patterns, and the precariousness of many farmers who remain reliant on coffee during a climate emergency. The coffee industry talks a big game about climate adaptation and mitigation, but it’s always measured and long-term. Calls to adapt and plan are all well and good, but funding is crucial. To prepare for a possibly destructive El Niño later this year, farmers will need help today.
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I'm a coffee writer and creator of The Pourover. Based in Scotland, I have over a decade of experience in the specialty coffee industry. Ask me about coffeewashing. It's pronounced Fin (he/him)
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