According to research published by Climate Action Lab, more than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño in the next six months.

Scientists project that global land temperatures will be 1.2°C/2.1° F above normal in the coming months due in large part to the current “Super El Niño” that began in June and is expected to last through Northern Hemisphere spring. These anomalously warm conditions will resemble the higher temperatures that climate change is projected to deliver 20 years in the future (figure below) and will lead to 44% more extremely hot days than we would expect in a normal year. El Niño is effectively pushing us into the future – exposing us to temperatures that won’t be the norm for another two decades – before we have time to adapt and protect ourselves.

As a result, they project that 451,000 lives will be lost due to heat in the first half of this El Niño, compared to a normal year. This is about 65 times larger than the 6,800 people believed to be dead or missing from the recent Nepal flash flood. In just the next 6 months, it is expected to cause around 240,000 deaths across the globe. With current forecasts suggesting El Niño will remain in place through spring 2027, they expect all of these numbers to grow even higher, particularly as impacts such as higher-than-average temperatures and heat-related deaths will linger into June and July.

The heat deaths that are still coming this year will hit the Global South the hardest.

“Postcard from the future”

The report states that anomalously warm temperatures that most of the globe will see during this El Niño event are a “postcard from the future”: while they feel anomalous now, they will become normal just a few decades into the future.

For more information on this report see impactlab.org/research/451000-at-risk.

For more about El Niño see unacov.uk/category/el-nino/.