The Indian Express | Needed: A Super El Niño Abhiyan

INCOIS, India’s ocean monitoring agency, predicts severe heat stress on both the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, peaking around March 2027. The livelihoods of millions of fisherpeople will be directly hit, with staples like sardine and mackerel likely to see reduced catch.

We are already feeling the pain. The southwest monsoon has closed well below its long-period average, with some regions recording September shortfalls of half the normal, hurting rice, pulses, cotton and maize. Reservoirs are thin heading into the rabi season. The main climatic punch is expected only from November onward. To avert some of the worst, we need to be better prepared. For starters, we will have to understand more. On September 16, 188 conservationists and researchers issued a “call to ecologists” to do so. Let’s not react after the fact this time, they plead. Let’s be proactive and prepare to gather rigorous data in real time. Let’s break our silos and make a multi-sectoral effort.

How can government agencies come together with scientists across public and private institutions to understand specific vulnerabilities? How can we monitor coral reef bleaching, large rainforest tree mortality, fire risks, urban heat island effects, and shifts in phenology and also in animal behaviour?

We need on-site measurement that matters to people, not just data from large-scale remote sensing.

Sadly, despite decades of anecdotal experience, we still do not have systematic data on how El Niño events actually play out across our natural ecosystems, and especially on communities and the livelihoods that are dependent on them. In Lakshadweep, the 1998 El Niño destroyed 80 to 90 per cent of live coral on most reefs studied. We know this only because a handful of researchers, like marine biologist Rohan Arthur, happened to be in the water with measuring tapes that year. Everything we later learned —that reefs with healthy fish populations recovered better, that local currents mattered more than assumed — exists only because someone was watching at the right time, in the right place.

This time, we have a whole new opportunity. It is an ecological and social crisis to which the political regime, too, will have to respond. The government already understands the urgency. It must now quickly facilitate access and funding support to develop the scientific evidence that will help us build our resilience. Philanthropic capital needs to understand this research effort as a moral imperative. Shall we start a Super El Niño Abhiyan, where scientific evidence, administrative readiness, and societal empathy come together to create an invincible shield of actionable knowledge for our people?