In this article, I would like to continue the conversation about the super El Niño that we are currently experiencing. It's been ten years since the last such event of this magnitude. With forecasters now warning that 2026 could bring an El Niño as strong or stronger, arriving alongside a possible positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), it's worth asking a genuinely useful question. Are we ready?

Before getting into this, it's important being precise about what this year is actually testing, because it isn't simply "2016 again." The last time an El Niño of this scale hit the Maldives, in 2015/16, the country was caught largely flat-footed. As outlined in my previous article, a national survey led by the Marine Research Centre, the Environmental Protection Agency, and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found that around 60 percent of coral colonies nationally had bleached, and up to 90 percent at some sites, one of the most severe mass bleaching events on record anywhere. This year's forecast combines El Niño with a possible positive Indian Ocean Dipole, which is a separate warming pattern closer to home that, on its own in 2019-20, pushed sea levels around the Maldives to record highs and drove mangrove dieback across roughly a quarter of all mangrove-containing islands in the country.

If both systems align in 2026, the readiness question becomes much more complex when we consider compounding impacts. We must ask how we handle reef stress, mangrove dieback, accelerated erosion and fisheries disruption all arriving within the same window. And this is just a scratch on the physical aspect of concerns. Impacts on humans and societies are much more convoluted and must be considered equally, if not in my opinion, more seriously.

It is very heartening to see the topic of El Niño being picked up and regularly circulating in newspapers and social media. It demonstrates awareness and interest. If you are currently in the Maldives, you would have seen the dramatic shifts in weather the past couple of days. Intensely strong winds, maritime accidents, heavy and erratic rainfall, followed by extreme heat.

So, what has changed since the 2016 super El Niño?

Early warnings have become a national priority.

In 2023, the Maldives became the first country in Asia, and the first Small Island Developing State, to sign onto the UN's "Early Warnings for All" initiative. More concretely, a China-UNDP-Maldives partnership launched in 2025 is upgrading the country's automated weather stations and radar network, and building localized, multi-language alert systems designed to reach outer islands, not just Greater Malé. This is a meaningful shift from 2016, when much of the bleaching response was reactive, assembled after the fact by researchers and citizen scientists rather than anticipated in advance.

The value of coral reefs as an integral part of shore protection is increasing.

There is now an active national conversation, backed by the World Bank's Country Climate and Development Report, about developing a coral management and funding plan running to 2050, scaling up restoration technologies, and even exploring reef insurance mechanisms that would fund rapid restoration after bleaching events rather than waiting years for ad hoc recovery funding. Framing reefs explicitly as economic and coastal-protection infrastructure, worth insuring and actively managing, is a genuinely different posture than a decade ago.

We understand the science and the interconnections much better.

The 2016 event produced the most comprehensive coral bleaching monitoring effort the country undertook to that point. Since then, research has also clarified how tightly reef and mangrove health are bound up with the performance of engineered shorelines. That gives policymakers a genuinely better basis than existed a decade ago for understanding why this year's dual El Niño-IOD risk deserves a different response than 2016 got.

A National Risk Registry is in place.

The National Disaster Management Authority and the Maldivian Red Crescent has spent the last two years formulating the first National Risk Registry of the Maldives through extensive stakeholder collaboration. This is a national and regional first, and the first such attempt over the past twenty years, significantly improving disaster preparedness and coordinated response. The NRRA will come into effect this year.

There is much more public awareness.

Thanks to online newspapers and the power of social media, information about the El Niño has been circulating much more than compared to 10 years ago. In June 2026, the Maldives Meteorological Centre confirmed El Niño conditions developing in the Pacific and has been issuing regular updates since. Informative articles on the topic have been covered by Maldives Independent, The Edition, Corporate Maldives, Aviators Maldives and Sun Online to name a few. On social media, there was an interesting post by UNFPA on El Niño and women's health. Both social.mv and eyo.mv published their own content, downscaling complex concepts into layman terms, which is so important.

What Hasn't Changed

Reefs and mangroves are still recovering from the last shocks, and are now facing a second, more complex one.

Coral can take well over a decade to meaningfully recover from a severe bleaching event, if it recovers at all. Scientific studies in the Maldives have shown that it took us over 16 years to recover from the 1997/98 coral bleaching event. Reefs hit hardest in 2016 have barely enough time to stabilize, let alone fully regrow, before facing a potentially larger and more compounded event this year. Mangroves, already showing significant dieback on a quarter of affected islands after the 2019/20 IOD event alone, have had even less recovery time. Repeated shocks compound the impacts. Each one hits a system with less resilience banked than the last, and this year, two systems are being hit at once rather than one.

Financing for adaptation remains reactive rather than pre-positioned.

Ideas like reef insurance and dedicated bleaching-response funds are being discussed but are not yet operational at the scale this year's forecast may demand. Much of the country's climate finance continues to flow toward hard infrastructure, reclamation and shoreline armouring, rather than the ecosystem-based measures, reef and mangrove protection specifically, that would reduce pressure on that same infrastructure during a compounded event like this one.

Local, outer-island capacity is still the weak link.

Early warning systems are only as useful as the ability of communities receiving them to act. Much of the recent investment has focused on the technology of forecasting and alerting; whether outer atoll councils and communities have the resources, guidance, and authority to respond meaningfully to an alert, adjusting fishing patterns as tuna moves to deeper water, protecting sensitive reef and mangrove sites, managing accelerated erosion, is a separate and less resolved question.

We are still reclaiming land at rapid scale.

On 9th May 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered a temporary suspension on all coastal development projects, including dredging, reclamation and sand pumping nationwide as a precautionary measure to protect our coral reefs from a 'catastrophic' coral bleaching event. This halt was ordered in response to the 2023/24 El Niño, an event that is substantially of lower magnitude and consequence than the Super El Niño we are current experiencing. As of today, no such measure has been taken.

We do not have established thresholds to determine heat stress.

Nor are there any mechanisms to capture heat stress related to humans. The MET Office has warned that the next three months will be hotter than usual. If you are in the country, you would have felt it. The heat is different this time round. But without established and agreed thresholds, we would not know when to issue warnings. Health conditions exacerbated by extreme heat like dehydration, exhaustion, respiratory or renal diseases, or health impacts on vulnerable populations such as pregnant women, elderly and children, or outdoor workers, will be treated as normal. But the linking data will remain uncaptured.

The Real Test

If 2026 does bring the compounded El Niño-IOD event currently being watched, it will be, in effect, a live audit of everything built since 2016. We have better instruments, better early warning, more sophisticated science, a new risk register, more public awareness, and a genuinely different policy conversation about reefs and mangroves as infrastructure. What it won't audit is whether that better information reliably translates into faster, better-resourced action on the ground, particularly outside Greater Malé, and particularly when the threat arrives as a compounded event rather than a single, well-understood shock like 2016.

Returning to the question of "are we ready?", my honest take is that we are better prepared to see it coming, but we are still building the capacity to actually absorb the impacts once it arrives.