Getting ready for El Niño

Two things landed on top of each other this July. Our corner of rural southwest France — the Dordogne — tipped into an "exceptional" drought: crisis-level water restrictions across most of the country, rivers running dry, a wildfire an hour from us that forced 10,000 people out of their homes. And, at the same time, forecasters started talking with unusual confidence about a very strong El Niño building in the Pacific — one that could rank among the biggest since records began, due to peak around the turn of the year, and plausibly make 2027 the hottest year ever recorded globally.

Already dry, and a big climate driver about to load the dice further. That combination was enough to make me actually sit down and work out what it means for us, rather than just half-absorbing the headlines. I spent a few days digging into the research — with an AI research assistant doing a lot of the legwork — and turned it into a real plan. This is the shareable version: what's going on, what it probably means for us here, and what we're actually doing about it.

What's actually happening

El Niño is the biggest source of year-to-year variability in the world's weather: every few years the central and eastern Pacific warms up, the trade winds slacken, and the atmosphere's whole circulation reorganises around that — drought in some regions, floods in others, extra heat everywhere. It's a natural cycle. This one is not starting from a natural baseline, though: it's arriving on top of the warmest decade ever measured, so the same event now produces more extreme absolute temperatures than an equivalent one thirty years ago.

Forecasters are about as confident as this kind of forecasting gets: essentially certain El Niño is underway, with a strong majority of models pointing to a "very strong" event peaking around November 2026–January 2027. The year after an El Niño peak tends to be the hot one — the ocean has spent the winter dumping heat into the atmosphere — so 2027 is shaping up as the likely next global heat record, possibly the first calendar year to tip over 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

What it probably means here

Europe isn't where El Niño's effects are sharpest — that's the tropics, where droughts and floods hit food-growing regions directly and push up the price of rice, coffee, cocoa, sugar and palm oil. For us the read is milder and comes through three channels:

A mild, wet, stormy winter is the base case. Strong El Niños tend to push the Atlantic storm track into western Europe. The last strong event, in 2023/24, brought France a relentless run of storms and its worst wheat harvest since 1983. For us that most likely means saturated ground, some local flooding, and the odd multi-day power cut from a rural line coming down in wind — not a crisis, just the normal texture of a big Atlantic winter, probably more of it. There's a silver lining too: it's exactly the rain our already-parched ground needs.

Summer 2027 is the real local risk. If 2027 is the next record-hot year, and our region keeps following the pattern of 2003, 2022 and now 2026, next summer could be the hardest one yet here — more heatwaves, deeper water restrictions, more stress on the garden and the land. Worth being honest with ourselves: the 35–40°C summers that used to feel exceptional are becoming the normal shape of summer where we live, El Niño or not.

Food and energy prices nudge upward. Not shortages — Europe is wealthy and largely self-sufficient in staples — but the commodities we import (rice, coffee, chocolate, sugar, palm oil, animal feed) get more expensive as tropical harvests take the direct hit.

Worth saying plainly: nothing here is catastrophe territory. We are among the least exposed people on the planet to this event. The point of paying attention isn't fear, it's just being a bit ahead of the curve.

What we're actually doing

Four unglamorous things, roughly in order of urgency:

The basics. A weekend of forward-buying the storable goods most exposed to price rises — rice, pasta, olive oil, coffee, chocolate, tinned fish — plus the ordinary outage kit (torches, a battery radio, a camping stove, some cash). A single phone call to check our home insurance actually covers storm damage and drought-related subsidence cracking, which turns out to matter a lot for houses on Dordogne clay.
Storm-proofing. Checking the roof, gutters and trees before autumn, and thinking hard about backup power — we heat with a heat pump, so for us a power cut in a cold snap is also a heating cut.
Storing winter water for summer. This is the one that took me longest to really get. My instinct was that stored water "disappears by summer" — but that's true of soil, rivers and open ponds, which drain and evaporate. It isn't true of a closed, dark tank: water you capture off the roof in January is still there, untouched, in July. Given our region's water problem is really a timing problem — wetter winters, drier summers, and getting more so each year — a tank is just time-shifting surplus into deficit. We're starting small (a few IBC totes off the gutters this summer) and will size up before the winter rains, so it's full by spring.
Heat-proofing the house. The house is already insulated, but not necessarily well for summer — thin insulation can perform fine in winter and badly in a heatwave. The cheap, high-leverage fix turns out to be external blinds on our roof windows, which stop the sun before it ever reaches the glass. After that: an insulation check, disciplined shutters on hot afternoons, night-time ventilation, and eventually one properly cool room for the worst nights.

We're also looking seriously at solar plus battery — partly as an energy-price hedge, partly because panel output peaks exactly when cooling demand does, and partly because a battery with "islanding" capability turns our storm-outage problem into a non-event. That one's a bigger, slower project, but it's the same investment whether or not this El Niño turns out to be as big as forecast.

The bit that actually matters

The thing I keep coming back to is that this isn't really a story about El Niño. El Niño is a temporary kicker on top of a baseline that's already shifted: the projections for our region are +2–4°C on summer temperatures by mid-century, summer rainfall down by a fifth to a third, winter rainfall up. Today's "exceptional" summer is roughly the median summer of the 2040s. So the plan above isn't survivalism and it isn't really about one climate cycle — it's just bringing forward, by a year or two, adaptations that make sense regardless: store the winter rain, keep the house liveable in heat, don't be surprised by a storm-caused power cut, and don't let food-price inflation catch us out. If this El Niño turns out milder than forecast, none of it is wasted.