El Niño Has Reached a Historical Magnitude. The UN Is Warning About The Impact To Latin American Economies.

A United Nations commission warned Monday that El Niño is poised to profoundly damage Latin American economies.

A report released by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) estimated that an extreme El Niño climate event would, conservatively, cause a decline of at least 2% in the region's gross domestic product over three years.

The havoc wrought by the climatic phenomenon will test the infrastructure of countries across Latin America. Experts say it's only a precursor of a more volatile future prompted by climate change.

In parts of Latin America, El Niño weather patterns are expected to result in flooding and mudslides, while others withstand prolonged drought and heatwaves that could strain energy supply and damage crops.

The weather and economic effects will vary widely by region, but the UN commission's report estimates that El Niño will result in up to 4.8 million more people living in poverty by the end of the decade across the regions.

The impacts of El Niño are likely to ripple throughout a world that is already increasingly witnessing extreme climate events.

"It is basically a dress rehearsal for the climate impacts that the world is now going to face, and fundamentally across the world we're seeing that rehearsal is being failed," said Theo Cox, a strategist with the UK-based Strategic Climate Risks Initiative.

As scientists grow more confident in the increasing severity of El Niño over the upcoming months, the UN commission is urging governments to fortify their infrastructure for the long-term.

"The responses adopted once the emergency is declared are considerably more expensive than the preventive measures based on adequate anticipation. It is imperative to move from a post-response to losses to an anticipatory management of climate risk," said José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, executive secretary of the commission.

In the near-term, utility companies and governments throughout the region have implemented preparative measures, such as intermittent blackouts to curtail energy usage.

Brazil, for example, has reportedly hired 4,600 people to help fight wildfires. Peru declared a broad 60-day state of emergency and is racing to clean its rivers in anticipation of heavy rains. Peru President Keiko Fujimori announced this month that 25 metal, modular bridges would be installed throughout the country to help prevent communities from being isolated due to the heavy rains brought by El Niño.

El Niño is a normal weather phenomenon that typically occurs every two to seven years, but the intensity of this year's in anything but usual.

Countries like Ecuador and Peru normally see what's known as upwelling along their coasts, where cold water deep in the Pacific Ocean rises to the surface. During El Niño, changing wind patterns weaken that upwelling and leave warm water sitting off their coasts, creating the perfect conditions for significant rains.

Thus, normally dry areas in the countries are suddenly saturated with rains they are ill-equipped to handle, explained Angel Francisco Adames Corraliza, a climatologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

For countries like Colombia and Brazil, El Niño has the opposite effect. While their Latin American neighbors are soaked, there is "a stabilizing effect over the rest of the tropics, and that tends to suppress rainfall," Adames Corraliza said.

Drought is especially a challenge in Colombia, which generates about two-thirds of its electricity through hydroelectric plants, and politicians there have already called on the government to fast-track energy generation projects to help avoid rationing during El Niño.

The Venezuelan government, meanwhile, has already blamed El Niño's drought and heat as it extends power cuts that can last between 6 and 11 hours in some regions of the country, El Pais reported in August.

The UN Commission is urging governments to diversify their energy sources and share energy resources across borders.

Cox warns against using the instability of hydroelectric power during El Niño as an excuse to revert to reliance on fossil fuels like natural gas.

"The lesson is one about diversification, regional cooperation and integration, rather than one about the need for fossil fuels to return or retain in the energy mix," Cox said.

Research has shown that nations affected by El Niño can have their economic growth stunted not only for the duration of the event, but they are thrown on a different developmental trajectory long afterwards, Cox said. That, in turn, restricts the fiscal capacity of the state to invest in resilience measures in preparation for the next major event.

But even countries that don't face the severest and most immediate impacts from El Niño won't be insulated from its consequences, which can cascade through the world economy as fuel and food prices rise. For example, Cox noted that the United States' war in Iran has already restricted trade through the Strait of Hormuz, and now El Niño is limiting the operation of the Panama Canal.

"The systems upon which we have come to rely to provide the basic fundamentals of our lives — our food systems, our energy infrastructure — were designed for a fundamentally different world: a world that no longer exists," Cox said.