El Niño amplifies trade and energy vulnerabilities

Summary

Benjamin Selwyn projects a ≥2°C El Niño anomaly for 2026 that will amplify existing geopolitical vulnerabilities across global food and energy networks.
A pre-existing Strait of Hormuz closure restricts ammonium nitrate availability and interacts multiplicatively with drought-induced crop reductions.
Historical conflict correlations underpin projections of doubled civil unrest likelihood in tropical countries during El Niño years.
Compensatory coordination and emergency stockpiling could structurally alter shock transmission pathways and prevent projected supply chain disruptions.

University of Sussex professor Benjamin Selwyn published an analysis in The Guardian on June 9, 2026, projecting a highly probable “super” El Niño—defined by a ≥2°C sea-surface temperature anomaly—for 2026, with potential persistence into 2027. The analysis outlines ten transmission mechanisms linking the climatic anomaly to global economic disruption, arguing that the environmental shock amplifies existing trade inequities, energy dependencies, and supply-chain vulnerabilities, with disproportionate impact on the global south.

Core Event & Baseline Parameters

University of Sussex professor Benjamin Selwyn published an analysis in The Guardian (June 9, 2026) projecting a “super” El Niño—defined as a ≥2°C sea-surface temperature anomaly—as highly probable for 2026, with potential persistence into 2027. The analysis outlines ten transmission mechanisms linking the climatic anomaly to global economic disruption, arguing that environmental shock amplifies existing trade inequities, energy dependencies, and supply-chain vulnerabilities, with disproportionate impact on the global south. Historical conflict baselines underpin downstream projections: Selwyn cites an external analysis linking approximately 21% of conflicts since 1950 to climate patterns including El Niño, and documents an estimated doubling of civil conflict likelihood in affected tropical countries during El Niño years, referencing drought and harvest failures in Sudan and Darfur as contributing factors.

Causal Architecture & Identifiability Constraints

The baseline directed acyclic graph (DAG) positions the El Niño anomaly (X) as the root intervention variable driving direct pathways to regional drought/monsoon disruption, reduced yields across maize/rice/wheat/soybean, heat stress in South Asia, suppressed oceanic upwelling/fisheries decline, increased wildfire risk, elevated coal consumption for cooling, and hydropower deficits triggering grid instability (e.g., Colombia). A critical confounding variable is the pre-existing fertilizer crisis triggered by the Strait of Hormuz closure (Z). Z independently constrains ammonium nitrate availability and reduces crop yields, interacting multiplicatively with X. Estimating X’s total effect on food-supply shock requires conditioning on Z. Structural identifiability rests on the assumption that no unmeasured common cause links X and Z, which appears plausible given the geopolitical origins of the Hormuz closure. The model assumes El Niño does not directly trigger protectionist fertilizer policies (export restrictions by China, Gulf states, and Algeria; Russia’s halt on ammonium nitrate licenses). These are modeled as pre-existing geopolitical fractures that respond to agricultural stress rather than originate from it. Historical correlation data (21% conflict linkage) operates at Rung 1 (Association) of the causal ladder. Projecting these correlations into a 2026 context defined by Hormuz closure requires a bridge to Rung 2 (Intervention/Forecast), contingent on structural stability—specifically, that the drought-to-conflict causal relationship remains invariant despite novel fertilizer trade restrictions.

Alternative Causal Structures & Empirical Discriminators

Latent selection dynamics suggest past El Niño-era conflicts may have been driven primarily by pre-existing institutional weakness in agrarian states, with climate acting as an amplifying trigger rather than an independent cause. Divergence in 2026 institutional resilience from historical baselines would alter conflict risk projections. An alternative DAG reverses the primary locus of agricultural fragility, modeling geopolitical decisions (export bans, license halts) as the dominant drivers of system stress. In this structure, El Niño functions as a moderator that amplifies fertilizer scarcity impacts on yields rather than an exogenous shock. Standard observational correlations between rainfall deficits and price spikes cannot distinguish between these competing architectures. Discrimination requires a natural experiment comparing regions with equivalent El Niño meteorological exposure but divergent fertilizer reserve access or trade-agreement protections. Yield variance tracking fertilizer access over precipitation deviations would support the geopolitical DAG; variance tracking precipitation regardless of input access would support the baseline climate-shock DAG.

Wicked-Future Scenario Matrix

The trend-extrapolation scenario projects the 2°C anomaly intersecting baseline vulnerabilities. Monsoon weakening strains coal-dependent grids; hydropower deficits trigger rationing; yields decline amid protectionist input policies. The system degrades incrementally, tracking historical El Niño precedents but amplifying economic damage through the elevated fertilizer baseline. In the orthogonal-driver scenario, the Hormuz closure escalates into a broader maritime conflict, disrupting global shipping and fertilizer trade independently of meteorological patterns. Climate stress becomes a secondary shock diverting adaptation resources; the food-system disruption remains identifiable but causal attribution to El Niño diminishes relative to the maritime chokepoint. The discontinuity scenario projects joint stressors pushing the system across a non-linear threshold. Concurrent grid failures or synchronized conflict doubling in major agricultural exporters triggers cascading export bans that halt global grain trade. Severe Brazilian wildfires release accumulated carbon stocks, accelerating regional warming beyond modeled El Niño effects. Linear supply-chain transmission collapses into nonlinear trade and governance failure. The reversal scenario projects crisis severity triggering compensatory coordination. Nations establish emergency fertilizer reserves overriding protectionist impulses; rapid deployment of distributed renewable grid architectures mitigates energy shocks. The predicted food-supply chain disruption is averted despite the climatic event. Transitioning to the reversal scenario requires backcasting preconditions: proximate interventions—coordinated fertilizer stockpiling, grid-hardening investments, and flexible trade agreements—as 2025 decision points to structurally alter shock transmission pathways.

Structural Synthesis & Risk Tensions

The projection contains a core structural tension: whether El Niño operates as an exogenous amplifier of geopolitical vulnerabilities (Selwyn’s baseline) or whether pre-existing geopolitical fragmentation is the dominant driver with climate serving as the failure trigger in a compromised system. If the alternative geopolitical DAG holds, trend-extrapolation scenarios likely underestimate severity, raising the probability of discontinuity even with moderate climate anomalies. Conversely, if reversal interventions successfully neutralize fertilizer trade restrictions, system sensitivity to the climatic shock drops significantly regardless of SST intensity. Historical agricultural and conflict base rates likely understate current risk due to novel joint stress (simultaneous fertilizer/energy chokepoint disruption alongside climatic anomaly), creating a deep-uncertainty zone where expected conflict and supply-shock values cannot be reliably computed from historical distributions. Multi-year climate stress may generate a latent feedback loop, destabilizing regions and threatening the security of the same geopolitical chokepoints initially independent of the weather phenomenon. An implicit energy feedback (climate shock → increased fossil-fuel substitution → longer-term emissions) compounds acute agricultural and conflict risks over extended horizons. The net analytical finding identifies the scenario set as a structured stress test for global institutional cohesion rather than a purely environmental forecast. Worst-case outcomes are driven by the conjunction of independent geopolitical and climatic shocks; the magnitude of systemic rupture is identifiable under standard assumptions, but the joint probability distribution remains unquantified and historically non-analogous.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Causal DAG: Maps cause and effect as an explicit directed graph, exposing confounders and mediators (Pearl).
Wicked Futures: Explores a long-horizon, deeply entangled future with no clean resolution.
Creative Destruction: Innovation that grows the economy by dismantling the incumbents it displaces (Schumpeter).
Antifragility (Taleb): Whether shocks break a system, leave it unharmed, or actually make it stronger.
Superforecasting (Tetlock): The habits — calibration, updating, track records — that make some forecasters reliably better.