10.22.26. Near final draft.

Three Things That Matter to Your Daily Life

1. La Niña is not going away. No major climate assessment projects that global warming will end La Niña. Climate models actually project more extreme La Niña events and more La Niñas that last two years or longer. More will be said about this further down the page here.

2. The swings are getting bigger, and that shows up in your weather. The strongest El Niño events are projected to come about twice as often, and both phases are expected to bring heavier rain and deeper droughts. That affects food prices, water supplies, insurance costs, and travel. More will be said about this further down the page here.

3. Both phases set up wildfire, just in different places. El Niño tends to dry out Indonesia, the Amazon, and eastern Australia. La Niña tends to dry out the U.S. Southwest and southern Plains, Argentina, and East Africa. Wherever you live, one phase or the other is your fire-risk phase. More will be said about this further down the page here.

 

Five Key Facts—and Why There Is Hope

Fact 1. The most extreme El Niño events are projected to rise from about 5 per century to about 10 per century as the planet warms.^[2],[4] More will be said about this further down the page here.

Fact 2. The most extreme La Niña events are projected to rise from about 1 every 23 years to about 1 every 13 years.^[3] More will be said about this further down the page here.

Fact 3. The total number of El Niño events is not projected to change much. What changes is how hard the strongest ones hit.^[1] More will be said about this further down the page here.

Fact 4. Fire emissions from tropical forests run about 133% higher during and after El Niño than during La Niña.^[9] More will be said about this further down the page here.

Fact 5. Right now, in October 2026, a strong El Niño is building in the Pacific. NOAA gives it a better than 83% chance of being strong to very strong through early 2027.^[10] More will be said about this further down the page here.

Why this page exists. You may have heard that global warming will make La Niña disappear and leave us stuck in a permanent El Niño. This page checks that idea against the science. The real answer is more interesting, and more useful for planning your life.

Why there is hope. ENSO is one of the most predictable parts of the climate system. Forecasters can often see an El Niño or La Niña coming six months or more ahead. That gives farmers, fire crews, cities, and families time to prepare. And the warming that is making the swings more extreme is something humans cause, which means it is something humans can slow. See what you can do here.

The mystery. If climate models say La Niña will grow stronger, why do some measurements make it look like La Niña is fading away? The answer involves a measuring trick that fools almost everyone who first looks at it. The mystery is solved further down the page here.

 

Find What You Need

• • Understanding the Subject: From Basics to Deeper Insights
    • The Basics: What El Niño and La Niña Are
    • How It Works: The Pacific Seesaw
    • The Mystery of the Vanishing La Niña
    • What the Research Projects
    • So How Often Will El Niño Happen?
    • Real-World Examples: How the Pacific Lights Fires
    • The Bigger Picture: Feedback Loops
    • Deeper Analysis: Fuel-and-Fire Whiplash
    • What It Means for the Future
  • What You Can Do: Start Here
  • Your Next Step
  • Evidence Standards
  • Uncertainties, Assumptions, Qualifications, and Limitations
  • Conclusion
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Glossary
  • AI Prompt Support
  • Sources and Bibliography

 

Understanding the Subject: From Basics to Deeper Insights

The Basics: What El Niño and La Niña Are

El Niño and La Niña are the two opposite phases of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. The tropical Pacific is the largest stretch of open ocean on Earth, so when its surface warms or cools, it changes where storms form and where rain falls across much of the planet.

The cycle swings back and forth every two to seven years. Each phase usually lasts nine to twelve months. La Niña sometimes lasts two or three years in a row. In between are "neutral" periods when the Pacific is close to normal.

Peruvian fishermen named El Niño centuries ago because the warm water often arrived around Christmas. Scientists later named the cold phase La Niña as its opposite.

 

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How It Works: The Pacific Seesaw

Think of the tropical Pacific as a long bathtub with a fan at one end. The fan is the trade winds. When the fan blows hard, warm water piles up at the western end near Indonesia, and cold water wells up at the eastern end near South America. That is La Niña.

When the fan slows down, the warm water sloshes back east. That is El Niño. The ocean and the winds keep pushing each other, so the seesaw never settles for long.

Scientists track the seesaw by measuring sea surface temperature in a box of the central Pacific called Niño-3.4. If the box is 0.5 °C warmer than normal for several months in a row, that counts as El Niño. If it is 0.5 °C cooler, that counts as La Niña. The word "normal" in that sentence turns out to matter a great deal, as the next section shows.

 

The Mystery of the Vanishing La Niña

Here is the measuring trick. Suppose you compare today's Pacific temperatures with the average from 1950 to 1980. The whole ocean has warmed since then. So almost every year looks "warmer than normal," El Niño readings seem to pile up, and La Niña readings seem to fade away.

Nothing about the seesaw has changed in that picture. Only the ruler is out of date. It is like measuring a growing child's height against the door frame from when they were five and concluding they can no longer crouch.

Scientists know about this problem. NOAA updates its "normal" every five years, and it now also tracks a Relative Oceanic Niño Index. That index compares the Niño-3.4 box with the rest of the tropical oceans instead of with a fixed past average, so global warming does not get mistaken for El Niño.^[10]

There is a second, more real source of the idea. Many climate models project that the eastern Pacific will slowly warm a little faster than the western Pacific. Researchers call this an "El Niño-like" average state. But the El Niño and La Niña swings keep happening on top of that new average. A warmer average changes where the seesaw starts from. It does not take away the down swing.

Mystery solved: La Niña only seems to disappear when warming is measured with an old ruler. Measured properly, it is still here, and it is projected to get more extreme. See the related qualifications here.

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What the Research Projects

The most widely cited projections come from large groups of climate models run under rising greenhouse gases. These models agree on the direction of several changes, even where they disagree on the size.

The chart below compares how often the most extreme El Niño and La Niña events happen in the models during the 20th century and the 21st century.

 

Chart 1. Both extremes become more common. Values are rounded model averages; individual models vary widely. Sources: Cai et al. 2014 for El Niño (20 models)^[2] and Cai et al. 2015 for La Niña (21 models).^[3] Wang et al. 2017 found the El Niño doubling is reached at 1.5 °C of warming, even under low emissions.^[4]

One detail stands out. About 75% of the projected rise in extreme La Niña happens in the year right after an extreme El Niño.^[3] The research describes a Pacific that swings harder from one extreme to the other, not one where the cold phase drops out.

La Niña is also projected to overstay its welcome more often. The next chart shows how much more often La Niña is projected to last two or more years in a row.

 

Chart 2. Projected increase in how often La Niña lasts two or more years, compared with the 20th century. Models agree more strongly under higher emissions. Source: Geng et al. 2023, Nature.^[5]

If La Niña were a houseguest, she is not moving out. She is staying longer and making bigger entrances. See the related qualifications here.

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So How Often Will El Niño Happen?

The research breaks this into three separate questions, and the answers are different.

How many El Niño events in total? Probably about the same as today. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found no model agreement on a steady change in the size of ENSO's ocean temperature swings this century.^[1] A 2022 study argued that newer models do show stronger swings under all four emissions scenarios it tested, so scientists are still debating this point.^[6]

How many extreme El Niño events? About twice as many: roughly one every 10 years instead of one every 20.^[2],[4] In the models, this increase keeps going for up to a century after global temperature stops rising, because the deep ocean keeps adjusting long after the air does.^[4]

How hard will each event hit on land? Harder. The IPCC says it is very likely that ENSO-driven rainfall swings will grow by the second half of this century.^[1] Warmer air holds more water vapor, so the same ocean pattern can deliver bigger floods in one place and deeper droughts in another. One study expects this rainfall change to stand out clearly from natural ups and downs by about 2040 under every emissions scenario it tested.^[7]

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Real-World Examples: How the Pacific Lights Fires

ENSO does not strike the match. People, lightning, and power lines do that. What ENSO does is decide which parts of the world will be dry enough for a spark to become a disaster.

Indonesia, 2015. During the strong 2015 El Niño, about 6.4 million acres (2.6 million hectares) burned in Indonesia between June and October. Most fires were set to clear land, but El Niño drought dried out the peat soils and let them spread out of control. Smoke covered much of Southeast Asia, and the World Bank put the cost at $16.1 billion.^[11]

A fire relay across the tropics. A study of six El Niño and six La Niña events from 1997 to 2016 found that tropical forest fire emissions were about 133% higher during and after El Niño than during La Niña. The fire moves like a relay race: it peaks first in Indonesia as El Niño builds, then passes to northern South America and Central America the following spring, and then to the southern Amazon.^[9]

La Niña's turn. La Niña winters tend to be drier than normal across the southern United States. That can set up early and active spring fire seasons in the Southwest and the southern Plains.^[12] La Niña also tends to bring drought to Argentina, southern Brazil, and East Africa.

So a world with bigger swings in both directions is a world where more regions take turns being primed to burn. See the related qualifications here.

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The Bigger Picture: Feedback Loops

ENSO and wildfire are linked into a larger loop. The diagram below shows how the pieces connect. Each arrow points from a cause to its effect. Thicker arrows mean stronger, better-established links.

Greenhouse gases warm the planet, which warms the ocean and air and adds moisture. That strengthens El Niño and La Niña extremes and directly dries fuels. 

Both lead to deeper droughts and heat in fire regions, which lead to more and larger wildfires. Fires release carbon dioxide, which adds to warming, closing a reinforcing loop.

Greenhouse gases warm the planet. Warmer ocean and air, more moisture.

Stronger El Niño and La Niña extremes create deeper droughts and heat in fire regions and more and larger wildfires. Fires release CO₂, adding to warming.

Most models: very likely dries fuels, reinforcing loop. 

Loops like this are what Job One for Humanity calls part of the Climageddon Feedback Loop: many climate consequences that push on each other, so that the whole system speeds up faster than any single piece would suggest. A loop that feeds itself does not calm down on its own. It calms down only when something outside the loop, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions, slows it.

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Deeper Analysis: Fuel-and-Fire Whiplash

Looking at ENSO as a system, rather than one phase at a time, reveals a pattern that is easy to miss. In many fire regions, the most dangerous sequence is a wet year followed by a dry one.

Here is how it works. A wet year grows a bumper crop of grass and brush. Then a dry year turns that new growth into fuel. In Australia, a wet La Niña followed by a dry El Niño can do this. In the U.S. Southwest, a wet El Niño winter followed by a dry La Niña winter can do it.

The research projects more frequent jumps from one extreme phase to the other. About three-quarters of the projected rise in extreme La Niña comes right after an extreme El Niño.^[3] Put those together, and you get a reasonable inference: more frequent whiplash means more years when a fire region has both extra fuel and the drought to dry it. That is on top of the steady drying that warming already causes.

In plain terms, the danger is not only that the Pacific gets stuck in one mode. The danger is that it swings harder and faster, so ecosystems and fire crews get less time to recover between the extremes. See the related qualifications here.

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What It Means for the Future

Right now (2026–2027). As of October 8, 2026, NOAA reports a strengthening El Niño, with the Niño-3.4 region about 2.1 °C warmer than normal and a better than 83% chance of a strong to very strong event through early 2027.^[10] Based on past events, regions that usually dry out during El Niño, such as Indonesia, the Amazon, and eastern Australia, face higher fire risk through 2027. The research above also suggests that a strong El Niño is the setup most often followed by a strong La Niña.

By about 2030 to 2040. Studies project that the human fingerprint on ENSO will start to stand out from natural variation: around 2030 for stronger eastern Pacific El Niño temperature swings, and around 2040 for stronger ENSO rainfall swings.^[7]

By the second half of this century. If emissions stay high, models project about twice as many extreme El Niño events, nearly twice as many extreme La Niña events, and roughly a third more multi-year La Niñas than in the 20th century.^[2],[3],[5] These are conditional projections. Lower emissions mean smaller changes, although the extreme El Niño increase appears even at 1.5 °C of warming.^[4] See the related qualifications here.

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The climate change IPCC wild card factor to never forget

Remember that the IPCC temperature forecasts and other significant temperature-dependent climate-change consequence forecasts have shown themselves to be significantly underestimated by any combination of the seven powerful reasons detailed on this page. This means that as bad as most of the climate change information or forecasts on this page already are, they could realistically be 20% to 30% worse in specific cases and under specific conditions. 

This is an important climate change, government, media, or IPCC summary report wild card to carefully consider, especially if you are doing climate change risk assessment, emergency planning, defensive adaptation planning, defensive resilience building, or potential migration. If you plan only for consistently underestimated IPCC timeframes or consequences, and those timeframes or consequences come 20% to 30% sooner or are 20% to 30% more severe than you prepared for, your risk mitigation plans will be dangerously inadequate. You will also face significant to severe additional financial losses and suffering. (Our organization and staff apply this 20% to 30% underestimation factor when planning for our own and our families' climate-change future.)

 

What You Can Do: Start Here

Here is the good news hiding in all of this. ENSO is one of the few climate patterns you can see coming months ahead. That turns it into something you can plan around, and even have a little fun with.

1. Become your household's Pacific forecaster. NOAA publishes an ENSO update on the second Thursday of every month.^[10] Read it with your family or friends, and make a friendly bet on next month's number. Loser makes dinner. You will learn how the Pacific affects your weather faster than any textbook could teach you.

2. Know your phase. Find out whether El Niño or La Niña is your region's dry, fire-risk phase. Look at the examples above, or ask your local weather service.

3. Prepare during the warning window. If your fire-risk phase is coming, use the months of warning. Clear dry brush and dead leaves near your home, check your insurance, sign up for local emergency alerts, and make a go-bag. If you farm or garden, ask your local extension service how the coming phase may affect planting and water.

4. Slow the loop at its source. Personal preparation protects you this season. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is what slows the feedback loop over the coming decades. For a realistic plan to do that, including what individuals, communities, and governments can each do, see Job One for Humanity's climate solution, Plan B.

5. Share what you learned. Most people still believe either that "La Niña is going away" or that ENSO has nothing to do with climate change. You now know better than both. Explaining the "old ruler" trick from the mystery section makes a great conversation starter.

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Your Next Step

The Pacific is not switching off its air conditioner. It is turning the dial harder in both directions. That is a challenge, but it is also predictable, and predictable problems are the ones we can prepare for.

Your next step is simple: find out which ENSO phase brings fire risk to your region, check this month's NOAA update, and then read Job One for Humanity's Plan B to see how we slow the loop for good.

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Evidence Standards

Established findings and mainstream assessments. El Niño and La Niña continue through this century under all emissions scenarios. ENSO-related rainfall swings are very likely to grow by the second half of the century. There is no model agreement on a change in the total size of ENSO's ocean temperature swings.^[1] El Niño raises tropical fire activity compared with La Niña.^[9]

Emerging findings. More frequent extreme El Niño^[2],[4] and extreme La Niña^[3] events; more back-to-back La Niñas^[5]; a robust increase in ENSO temperature variability in newer models^[6]; and emergence dates for these signals around 2030 to 2040.^[7] These come from large groups of peer-reviewed models, but they are not yet IPCC consensus.

DMAP conclusions. The "disappearing La Niña" idea is mostly a measurement artifact of a fixed baseline. More frequent swings between extremes are likely to produce more "fuel-and-fire whiplash" years, in which a wet phase grows fuel and the following dry phase burns it. ENSO, warming, drought, and fire form a reinforcing loop that will not settle on its own.

Job One precautionary planning scenarios. For planning purposes, households and communities in ENSO-sensitive fire regions should assume that extreme ENSO years will arrive about twice as often as in the 20th century, and that a very strong El Niño may be followed quickly by a strong La Niña, shifting fire risk from one set of regions to another within one or two years.

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Uncertainties, Assumptions, Qualifications, and Limitations

Model projections are not certainties. The extreme-event numbers in What the Research Projects and What It Means for the Future are averages across climate models under specific emissions scenarios. Individual models range widely, and some show little change. The El Niño and La Niña figures in Chart 1 come from two separate studies with somewhat different definitions of "extreme," so the bars are comparable in direction but not exactly in method. The Geng et al. percentages in Chart 2 come from the paper's summary; the exact baseline period and whether the change is relative or in percentage points should be confirmed against the full paper.

Models and observations disagree. Most models say the Pacific should be trending toward an "El Niño-like" state. Over recent decades, the real Pacific has trended the other way, toward a more La Niña-like pattern.^[8] Scientists do not yet know whether the models are wrong, or whether natural variation is temporarily hiding the trend. Either way, this disagreement makes a "no more La Niña" outcome even less supported.

Measuring choices. The mystery section describes how a fixed baseline can make La Niña seem to vanish. Different agencies use different indexes and baselines, so whether a given year "counts" as El Niño or La Niña can differ slightly between NOAA, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, and others.

The total number of El Niño events. The IPCC found no consensus on change, while a 2022 study argued for a robust increase in variability.^[1],[6] This page reports both views in So How Often Will El Niño Happen?

ENSO is one of several fire drivers. The examples in Real-World Examples are regional. Globally, total burned area tracks other ocean patterns, especially in the tropical North Atlantic, more closely than ENSO.^[13] Land use, fire suppression, and ignition sources also matter a great deal. The 2015 Indonesia fires were mostly set by people, with El Niño drought letting them spread.^[11]

Fuel-and-fire whiplash is an inference. The idea in Deeper Analysis combines established fire ecology (wet years grow fuel, dry years burn it) with projected ENSO swings. No study cited here directly projects future whiplash fire seasons. The strength of the effect varies by region and vegetation type.

Current conditions. The 2026 El Niño figures in What It Means for the Future reflect NOAA's October 8, 2026 update and will change. Check NOAA for the latest.

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The climate change IPCC wildcard factor to never forget

Remember that the IPCC temperature forecasts and other significant, temperature-dependent climate-change consequence forecasts have been significantly underestimated by any combination of the seven powerful reasons detailed on this page. This means that as bad as most of the climate change information or forecasts on this page already are, they could be 20% to 30% worse in specific cases and under specific conditions. 

This is an important climate change, government, media, or IPCC report wild card to carefully consider, especially if you are doing any climate change risk assessment, emergency planning, adaptation planning, resilience building, or potential migration. If you plan for consistently underestimated IPCC timeframes or consequences, and they come 20% to 30% sooner or are 20%-30% more severe than you are prepared for, your risk mitigation plans will not suffice, and you will be in for significant to severe additional financial losses and suffering. (Our organization and staff apply this 20% to 30% underestimation factor when planning for our own and our families' climate-change future.)

Conclusion

Global warming is not expected to end La Niña. The idea that it will come mostly from measuring a warming ocean with an out-of-date ruler. Measured properly, both phases continue, and the research projects that both get more extreme: extreme El Niño about twice as often, extreme La Niña nearly twice as often, more La Niñas that last for years, and bigger floods and droughts from each event.

For your life, that means the climate pattern that already decides which continents burn in a given year will deliver bigger dry spells more often, and will swing between them faster. The new conclusion from putting all of this together is that the greatest fire danger may come less from one phase taking over and more from the whiplash between them, as wet years grow fuel and dry years burn it.

The hopeful part is that ENSO gives months of warning. Used well, that warning saves homes, harvests, and lives, and cutting emissions slows the loop that is making the swings worse.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Will there be no more La Niña in the future?
No. No major study or IPCC report projects La Niña ending. Models project more extreme La Niña events and more multi-year La Niñas. See What the Research Projects.

Then why have I heard that the Pacific is becoming "permanently El Niño"?
Partly because of the old-baseline measuring problem, and partly because many models project a slightly "El Niño-like" average state. Neither one stops the swings. See The Mystery of the Vanishing La Niña.

Will El Niño happen every year?
No. The total number of El Niño events is not projected to change much. The strongest ones are projected to come about twice as often.

Is the 2026 El Niño caused by climate change?
El Niño is a natural cycle and has happened for thousands of years. Climate change does not create a single event, but it adds heat and moisture that can make an event's effects stronger, and it is projected to make extreme events more frequent.

Does El Niño or La Niña cause more wildfires?
It depends on where you live. In tropical forests, El Niño brings far more fire. In the U.S. Southwest, southern Plains, and Argentina, La Niña is usually the drier, riskier phase. See Real-World Examples.

If the models disagree with recent observations, why trust them?
That is a fair question, and scientists are working on it. But the disagreement points toward a more La Niña-like Pacific, which makes the idea of La Niña disappearing even less likely. See Uncertainties.

Can anything be done?
Yes. Use the months of warning to prepare locally, and support cutting emissions to slow the loop. See What You Can Do.

 

Glossary

CMIP5 and CMIP6. The fifth and sixth phases of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, the coordinated sets of climate model runs that most climate projections use.

El Niño. The warm phase of ENSO, when central and eastern tropical Pacific surface water is at least 0.5 °C warmer than normal.

ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation). The natural back-and-forth cycle between El Niño, La Niña, and neutral conditions in the tropical Pacific.

Emissions scenario. A "what if" path for future greenhouse gas emissions used to run climate models, from low to high.

Extreme El Niño. An unusually strong El Niño that shifts heavy rain far into the eastern Pacific, like the events of 1982–83, 1997–98, and 2015–16.

Extreme La Niña. An unusually strong La Niña with very cold water in the central Pacific, like the 1998–99 event.

Feedback loop. A chain of causes in which the end result feeds back to the start. A reinforcing loop makes itself stronger; a balancing loop calms itself down.

IPCC. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that assesses climate science.

La Niña. The cool phase of ENSO, when central and eastern tropical Pacific surface water is at least 0.5 °C cooler than normal.

Multi-year (back-to-back) La Niña. A La Niña that lasts two or more years in a row, such as 2020 to 2023.

Niño-3.4. The box of the central tropical Pacific whose surface temperature is used to define El Niño and La Niña.

Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI). A NOAA measure that compares Niño-3.4 with the average of the whole tropical ocean, so overall warming is not mistaken for El Niño.

Trade winds. Steady winds that blow from east to west along the equator.

 

AI Prompt Support

Copy any of these prompts into an AI assistant to explore further:

• "Explain the difference between El Niño and La Niña to a 12-year-old, using a bathtub or seesaw analogy."
• "In my region, [your city or region], which ENSO phase usually brings drier conditions and higher wildfire risk? Cite NOAA or my national weather service."
• "Summarize the latest NOAA ENSO Diagnostic Discussion and tell me what it means for fire risk where I live."
• "What do Cai et al. 2014, Cai et al. 2015, and Geng et al. 2023 project for extreme El Niño and La Niña events? What are the main uncertainties?"
• "Why do climate models and observations disagree about the tropical Pacific temperature trend, and what would each answer mean for future La Niña?"
• "Explain how a wet year followed by a dry year can make a wildfire season worse, with examples from Australia and the U.S. Southwest."
• "Make me a household checklist for preparing for a fire season that is expected to be worse than normal."

Sources and Bibliography

1. IPCC (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers and Chapter 4. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
2. Cai, W., et al. (2014). Increasing frequency of extreme El Niño events due to greenhouse warming. Nature Climate Change, 4, 111–116. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2100
3. Cai, W., et al. (2015). Increased frequency of extreme La Niña events under greenhouse warming. Nature Climate Change, 5, 132–137. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2492
4. Wang, G., Cai, W., et al. (2017). Continued increase of extreme El Niño frequency long after 1.5 °C warming stabilization. Nature Climate Change, 7, 568–572. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3351
5. Geng, T., et al. (2023). Increased occurrences of consecutive La Niña events under global warming. Nature, 619, 774–781. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06236-9
6. Cai, W., et al. (2022). Increased ENSO sea surface temperature variability under four IPCC emission scenarios. Nature Climate Change, 12, 228–231. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-022-01282-z
7. Ying, J., et al. (2022). Emergence of climate change in the tropical Pacific. Nature Climate Change; and Geng, T., et al. (2022), Nature Communications, on eastern Pacific ENSO emergence around 2030. Summary: IBS Center for Climate Physics. https://ibsclimate.org/news/human-influence-on-el-nino-rainfall-events-to-become-detectable-within-the-next-20-years/
8. Seager, R., et al. (2019). Strengthening tropical Pacific zonal sea surface temperature gradient consistent with rising greenhouse gases. Nature Climate Change, 9, 517–522. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0505-x
9. Chen, Y., et al. (2017). A pan-tropical cascade of fire driven by El Niño/Southern Oscillation. Nature Climate Change, 7, 906–911. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0014-8
10. NOAA Climate Prediction Center. ENSO Diagnostic Discussion, issued October 8, 2026. https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtml
11. World Bank (2016). The Cost of Fire: An Economic Analysis of Indonesia's 2015 Fire Crisis. Indonesia Sustainable Landscapes Knowledge Note 1. World Bank knowledge note (PDF)
12. NOAA Climate.gov. ENSO: El Niño and La Niña impacts. https://www.climate.gov/enso
13. Forest Science and Technology Centre of Catalonia (CTFC). Global burned area and ocean-climate teleconnections, 1982–2018. https://blog.ctfc.cat/?p=10223

Keep reading: El Niño and La Niña decide where fire risk shifts each year. To see how warming is raising fire risk everywhere, read our companion article on global warming and forest fires, then explore Job One for Humanity's Plan B.

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Authorship

This document was created by Lawrence Wollersheim, Senior DMAP analyst at the Universe Institute. AI was used to research, assemble, and verify the accuracy of this article.