Preparing UNDP Country Offices for an unfolding emergency
As climate volatility accelerates, El Niño and La Niña cycles are increasingly compounding fragility, disrupting livelihoods, and threatening hard-won development gains across our programme countries. UNDP's ability to anticipate, rather than simply respond to, these cycles is becoming a defining test of our value proposition as a development partner, and a critical lever for protecting the investments we help countries make in their own resilience.
The 2026–2027 El Niño event is not a future risk: it is already underway. NOAA confirmed El Niño conditions on 11 June 2026 and assigns a 63% probability of a very strong event by November-January; WMO places the probability of onset at 80–90%+ through the northern hemisphere winter. The event will not affect all countries the same way: it is bringing severe drought to some regions, catastrophic flooding to others, and extreme heat almost everywhere, often within the same country. It also arrives compounded by Middle East-driven fuel, fertilizer and food price volatility, active conflict in Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Ukraine and Mozambique, and development baselines in many countries still weakened by the 2023/24 El Niño.
To support UNDP Country Offices, UNDP's Crisis Bureau and Bureau for Policy and Programme Support have developed two companion resources.
The Global Overview and Strategy sets out the evidence base and the case for action: probabilistic forecasts from NOAA, WMO, IRI and regional climate bodies; a region-by-region risk landscape covering Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe & Central Asia, Latin America & the Caribbean and the Arab States; and the economic argument for pre-positioning now. The brief frames El Niño risk management as a permanent line of development work, anchored in UNDP's risk-informed development entry points.
The UNDP Country Office Pathway translates that strategy into a practical, step-by-step guide. It organizes 14 priority actions around four steps that UNDP Country Offices can work on in parallel rather than in strict sequence: See the Risk (activate monitoring and build a shared evidence base), Get Ready (turn evidence into agreed triggers, plans and government-facing action), Protect People & Services (keep essential services running and reach the most exposed), and Recover & Institutionalize (plan recovery alongside anticipatory action so the next event finds a stronger UNDP).
These documents are intended to give UNDP a coherent, evidence-based foundation for anticipatory action on El Niño, offering guidance that UNDP Country Offices can adapt to their specific risk contexts. Developed jointly by the Crisis Bureau and the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support, they are living resources that will be updated regularly as the 2026–2027 El Niño event evolves, as forecast institutions issue new guidance, and as regional briefs are revised. They are not formal UNDP knowledge products, but practice documents prepared to support UNDP Country Offices' operational planning.
For more information and support, please reach out to Ronald Jackson ([email protected]) and Cassie Flynn ([email protected]).
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