For the past few months, scientists studying global weather patterns have been closely monitoring what is brewing in the Pacific Ocean. The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently reported a 90 percent chance of a very strong event during the latter months of 2026 and the early part of 2027. National Geographic called it plainly: a Super El Niño, the strongest in a decade, is forming in the Pacific. Ocean temperatures are already running more than 2°C above average.

The last time this happened, it led to multiple extreme weather scenarios around the globe. Sixteen tropical cyclones passed through the Central Pacific Hurricane Basin, including three category 4 storms that occurred simultaneously. It led to severe drought in Ethiopia, leaving 10 million people in need of food aid. Haiti's crop yields were cut by half. Tamil Nadu in India experienced its heaviest rainfall in a century, causing over 500 deaths, while another 2,000 people in southern and eastern parts of India were killed in heatwaves. There were numerous disease outbreaks across South Asia, Tanzania, the United States and Brazil. In the Maldives, we suffered massive coral bleaching events that weakened over 70 percent of our reef systems.

You get the picture. A super El Niño is not good news for any country, let alone small island states. But it is inevitable.

My dear friend, the esteemed local meteorologist and climatologist Ahmed Shabin, explained what a super El Niño means for the Maldives in a brilliant piece a few months back. His dual role as a humanitarian gives him a unique perspective on what something happening thousands of miles away means for our nation. I encourage you to read his article here. I am no climatologist, but I trust Shabin's authority when he says we need to be prepared for what is coming our way.

Our (engineered) islands are built for the trend, but are we ready for the spike?

Almost every major piece of coastal infrastructure in the Maldives — from Hulhumalé's raised edges to the breakwaters and revetments now ringing dozens of islands — has been designed around a gradual threat, mostly building on past trends. Projections of future sea level rise are rarely, if at all, considered in engineering designs. Engineers plan for the trend by raising land and hardening shorelines by an amount roughly matched to expected long-term rise. Most engineering decisions are path dependent. Hulhumalé was raised to two metres. We stick with what we know has worked so far.

But El Niño doesn't behave like a gradual trend. It's a short, sharp anomaly, and in the Maldives it rarely arrives alone. Because of our central location in the middle of the Indian Ocean, it interacts with the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), a separate but related pattern of ocean warming closer to home. When El Niño coincides with a positive IOD phase, as is a real possibility this year, sea temperatures around the Maldives can rise sharply and suddenly, wind patterns across the Indian Ocean shift, and sea levels can surge at a pace far beyond what our shorelines and natural buffers are built to absorb.

Reefs, mangroves and seawalls were never separate systems

This is the part worth sitting with. Our adaptation infrastructure and our natural coastal defences — both coral reefs and mangroves — were never meant to work in isolation from each other. Healthy reefs absorb wave energy before it ever reaches a seawall or a revetment. Mangroves stabilise shorelines, buffer storm surge, and support the fisheries many island communities depend on.

When El Niño and a positive IOD combine to stress both systems at once, the damage reaches far beyond ecological domains. It quietly increases the load on every piece of hard engineered infrastructure sitting behind them, at exactly the moment sea levels and wave patterns are also behaving abnormally.

We have been here before

El Niño events are a natural occurrence. They form every two to seven years, and they play a significant role in regulating the earth's climate.

Some of you may remember the 1997–98 event, which bleached around 90 percent of Maldivian coral reef systems. More would have heard about the 2015–16 event, with comparable impacts. And even outside climate, marine science and environmental circles, many of us will clearly recall the 2019–20 mass mangrove die-offs.

The scale of that die-off was so concerning, and so visible, that it was difficult for anyone on social media to ignore. People wondered what could have caused it, and what it meant for our islands. I was among them. In 2024, I got the answers in an insightful scientific report published in Nature: the mass mangrove die-off was caused by sea level rise and an extreme Indian Ocean Dipole.

If the remaining months of 2026 bring a super El Niño and a positive IOD together, the Maldives would be facing a compounded version of two separate events that were each individually damaging on their own.

But what does this mean in practice?

As past events have demonstrated, either of these events — or the two compounded together — would have lasting impacts that extend well beyond coral reefs and mangrove ecosystems. They would accelerate erosion, weaken natural buffering systems, and disrupt the natural movement of sand between and around the islands. The fisheries sector would likely be affected, with consequences for families who rely on fisheries for their livelihoods and sustenance. The extent of extreme weather events such as intense rainfall or severe storms cannot be predicted with much certainty, but they will occur. Lives would be disrupted, with the remotest, most peripheral islands — those with small populations and weak local economies — suffering the most.

For an island nation whose entire adaptation strategy rests on engineered land and hard shoreline protection, these events would present a genuine stress test.

This is not about whether we can survive one bad year. It is about whether assumptions built into decades of infrastructure planning hold up when conditions deviate sharply from the long-term average — and when they deviate on multiple fronts at once: ocean temperature, sea level rise, and erratic wind patterns.

It's also a preview of a more general problem. As El Niño and IOD events themselves may become more frequent or intense under a warming climate, "the trend" that our infrastructure is designed for is itself becoming a less reliable planning benchmark.

What this asks of us

I must once again be explicit that none of the above argues against hard infrastructure altogether. Our unique circumstances necessitate it.

But it does argue for planning that treats reef health, mangrove ecosystems and engineered protection as parts of a single system, rather than as three separate policy conversations split across government entities. It also argues for building genuine safety margins into new projects, rather than designing to the average sea-level rise projection and hoping extreme years don't coincide with natural buffers already under stress — that is, with what is left of them.

2026 will be remembered for its heat and its coral impacts. But the more useful lesson may be the one it teaches about how our natural and built defences interact, and how much resilience we actually have in reserve when both are tested in the same year.