For the past few months, scientists studying global weather patterns have been closely monitoring what is brewing up in the Pacific Ocean. The United States National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration recently reported a 90 percent chance of ‘a very strong event’during the latter months of 2026, trickling into early parts of 2027. The National Geographic warned that 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 in 2015/2016; 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. Both Marshall Islands and Micronesia declared state of emergency due to El Niño driven droughts which affected nearly 7,000 people, sea levels across Micronesia also dropped 40 cm below normal, exposing vast areas of coral reefs to intense heat leading to coral bleaching, in Fiji, water rationing impacted at least 30,000 people and Papua New Guinea experienced its worst drought and famine. The experience of the Caribbean was also similar. 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 to any country, let alone small island states. But it is inevitable.

My dear friend and esteemed local Meteorologist and Climatologist Ahmed Shabin explained what a super El Niño means for the Maldives in his 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 people. 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 historic trends. Projections around future sea level rise is rarely, if at all, considered in engineering designs. Engineers plan for that trend by raising land and hardening shorelines by an amount roughly matched to expect long-term rise. Most engineering decisions are path dependent. Hulhumalé was raised to 2 meters. We stick with what we know has worked so far. 

But an 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 ourengineered shorelines and natural buffers are built to absorb.

This is the part worth sitting on. 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 surges, and support the fisheries many island communities depend on. When an 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.

But as we all know, El Niño’s are a natural phenomenon that have been recurring for hundreds of millions of years. They form every two to seven years, and they play a significant role in regulating the earth’s climate. But super El Niños are rare, or less frequent. Some of you may remember the 1997-98 event which bleached around 90 percent of Maldivian coral reef systemswhich took us over 16 years to recover. Even more of you would potentially have heard about the 2015-16 event with comparable impacts. Whether you belong inside or outside of climate, marine, and environmental circles, you would be able to recall the 2019-2020 mass mangrove diebacks. The scale of this event was so significant, so concerning, and so very visible, it was difficult for any of us to ignore. It would have probably been the first time in our nation’s history that everyday people were able to witness the sheer magnitude of this event, thanks to excellent citizen-led drone photography, social media and news coverage. Many of us wondered what could have caused it, and what this meant for our islands. I was among these people. In 2024, I got the answers in an insightful scientific report published in Nature. The mass mangrove die off was due to sea level rise and 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 compounded together, would have lasting impacts that transcend 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. Fisheries sector would likely be impacted, affecting those families reliant 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. It would likely disrupt lives, with the remotest, most peripheral islands 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, but 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, ocean temperature, sea level rise, and erratic wind patterns, all at once. 

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.

I must once again be explicit that none of the above argues against hard infrastructure altogether. Our unique circumstances necessitate them. But it does argue for planning that treats reef health, mangrove ecosystems, and engineered protection as parts of a single system, rather than three separate policy conversations split across various 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, 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 have in reserve when both are tested in the same year.