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As a strengthening El Niño builds across the Pacific Ocean, governments throughout Latin America have begun mobilizing emergency resources and activating contingency frameworks to brace for a wave of coming climate disruptions, from crippling drought and extreme heat to devastating floods and landslides. Meteorologists have confirmed the climate phenomenon is already active, with projections indicating it will continue to gain intensity through the final months of 2024. Unlike sudden natural disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes, El Niño develops gradually over months, offering governments a critical window of preparation before its most severe impacts hit. However, climate experts warn regional authorities have a long track record of failing to translate early scientific forecasts into actionable, proactive measures, leaving open questions about whether the region will avoid the widespread damage that marked past major El Niño events.
Past strong El Niño cycles inflicted billions of dollars in economic damage across Latin America. The climate system shifts bring uneven impacts: some regions face extreme, long-lasting drought, while others get pounded by excessive rainfall that triggers floods and deadly landslides. In previous events, El Niño disrupted regional agricultural production, strained already limited drinking water supplies, fueled large-scale out-of-control wildfires, and cut hydroelectric power output in hydrology-dependent nations, leading to widespread energy shortages. The World Meteorological Organization’s representative for North America, Central America and the Caribbean, Rodney Martinez, emphasized that the confirmed, ongoing event requires urgent action now, not delayed planning. “El Niño is confirmed. El Nino is ongoing. It’s not simply a possibility,” Martinez said. “Now is the time for decisions, for effective preparedness and the political consistency to really be proactive this time.”
Martinez urged countries to use the remaining window before impacts peak to shore up alternative energy supplies, protect high-vulnerability communities, and pre-position resources to handle strain on critical public services. For nations heavily reliant on hydropower such as Ecuador, this means activating thermal power generation capacity to offset falling reservoir levels during extended dry periods, and completing all required maintenance and procurement well ahead of potential shortages. He pointed to 2023’s widespread energy crisis in Ecuador, where severe drought drained hydroelectric reservoirs and left millions without power for days, as a clear warning of what could come this year.
According to WMO data, Central America, parts of the Caribbean and northern South America are already recording far drier conditions than the historical average, changes directly linked to the developing El Niño. These dry conditions are projected to spread into large swathes of the Amazon basin, stoking urgent concerns over drinking water access, agricultural productivity, and elevated wildfire risk. Threat levels and types vary dramatically across the region, leading to targeted preparation efforts:
In Brazil, Colombia and much of Central America, the top priorities are preparing for drought, potable water shortages, and an unusually intense wildfire season. Brazil has already deployed more than 4,600 federal personnel to support wildfire prevention and response, expanded professional firefighting brigades, and pre-positioned aerial firefighting aircraft ahead of what officials warn could be one of the worst fire seasons on record. Colombia, for its part, has activated continuous national water level monitoring systems, upgraded wildfire response preparedness, and issued guidance to local governments to pre-plan for potential water shortages.
In other parts of the region, governments are gearing up for catastrophic flooding. Historically, strong El Niño events bring intense, damaging rainfall to Ecuador’s Pacific coast, prompting the national government to order local authorities to draft tailored contingency plans and allocate millions of dollars for flood mitigation infrastructure, emergency response deployments, and post-disaster agricultural recovery. Local teams have already begun clearing blocked drainage channels, stabilizing landslide-prone hillsides, and setting up stocked emergency shelters for displaced residents. Costa Rica has rolled out more than 200 separate actions under a national contingency plan, ranging from protecting drinking water reserves to expanding backup renewable energy capacity to prepping for severe wildfires. Peru has upgraded its national monitoring and early warning systems and expanded its on-the-ground meteorological observation network to track changing conditions in real time. Panamanian officials have also developed specific contingency plans to protect operations at the Panama Canal, one of the world’s busiest and most economically critical trade routes, where reduced rainfall can lower water levels enough to disrupt shipping transits.
The WMO warns that El Niño’s impacts will stretch beyond immediate environmental disruption: prolonged drought and extreme heat threaten food security across Central America’s Dry Corridor, while excessive rainfall and flooding in other regions can damage critical infrastructure, contaminate drinking water supplies, and increase the risk of widespread infectious disease outbreaks.
Despite the months of early advance warning, experts warn preparation efforts remain deeply uneven across the region. Martinez noted that many authorities still delay critical planning and investment, even as scientific forecasts grow more certain about El Niño’s intensity. Some officials wait for additional confirmation of the event’s track, while others wrongly assume their countries will avoid the worst impacts. “The reality is that this preparation doesn’t happen until they have the emergency,” he said. Postponing action, he warned, will leave governments scrambling to respond once droughts, floods and heat waves reach their peak intensity.
Colombia’s Environment Minister Irene Vélez told the Associated Press that while El Niño is a recurring climate event, its current intensity is unprecedented, bringing new risks of longer duration and a broader geographic reach than past events. Research on past major El Niño events has found the economic damage can linger for years, with the most severe cycles ultimately costing the global economy trillions of dollars in cumulative losses. For governments that have not yet acted, Martinez’s message is clear: “Be prepared in advance, in a serious way. The information is there. Now is the time for decisions.”
Vélez added that the challenge goes far beyond responding to a single extreme climate event, arguing that governments across the region must implement long-term systemic adaptation to address increasingly frequent and intense extreme conditions driven by human-caused climate change. “Climate change is here to stay,” she said.

Nestled along the sparkling emerald waters of southeastern Brazil’s Ilha Grande Bay, a small fishing community has undergone a profound shift in its relationship with one of the ocean’s most misunderstood predators: the blacktip shark. Where locals once viewed these sharks as a readily available source of food, a groundbreaking scientific discovery has transformed the region into a unexpected hub for global shark conservation efforts.

The turning point came when a team of researchers uncovered that Piraquara de Fora, a sheltered local cove, serves as a regular gathering ground for dozens of pregnant blacktip sharks. This finding launched the Sharks of Ilha Grande Bay project, run under the Brazilian Institute for Nature Conservation, which is working to turn community attitudes toward shark protection.

Brazil holds a uniquely important position in global shark conservation: it boasts the highest national shark meat consumption in the world, while its extensive coastline supports an extraordinary diversity of shark species and hosts critical habitats for many populations already classified as threatened. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) warns that sharks rank among the most at-risk groups of vertebrates on the planet, with more than one-third of all species facing extinction due to overfishing, habitat destruction, and climate change. That makes protecting Brazilian shark habitats a global priority.

Experts leading the project emphasize that identifying and safeguarding shark nurseries is the backbone of effective long-term conservation. Unlike most bony fish, sharks have extremely slow reproductive rates, producing far fewer offspring per breeding cycle, which leaves their populations especially vulnerable to population collapse. “Breeding areas are fundamental to ensuring the species survives throughout this Atlantic ecoregion,” explains Leonardo Mitrano Neves, who leads the project’s scientific team. To build robust data to support protection efforts, Neves and his team recently conducted on-site monitoring, submerging camera-equipped monitoring devices across the cove, baited to attract sharks, before analyzing collected footage and drone imagery in a laboratory.

While blacktip sharks are the most common species in the cove, the project also extends conservation work to other at-risk local species, including sand tiger sharks and hammerhead sharks. Beyond scientific research, the initiative focuses on deep, community-centered engagement, including rolling out environmental education programs in local schools to reframe sharks as a valued part of the region’s natural heritage, rather than prey. Outreach materials also stress that local shark species pose no threat to humans, noting that no unprovoked shark attacks have ever been recorded in the area.

The project also addresses a key regulatory gap that continues to threaten shark populations across Brazil. While Brazilian law bans targeted fishing of protected shark species, incidental bycatch of non-protected sharks is still permitted, and loose labeling rules allow unregulated shark meat to be sold under the generic market name “cação”, making it almost impossible for consumers to identify what they are buying. Conservation teams are working to educate locals about the dual risks of eating shark meat: the harm it causes to already endangered populations, and the direct health hazards for consumers. As apex predators, sharks accumulate dangerous levels of toxic heavy metals including mercury, arsenic, and lead in their tissues over their lifetimes; a 2024 study even detected traces of cocaine in some Brazilian sharpnose sharks tested off the country’s coast.

Project coordinator José Truda Palazzo reports that these community outreach efforts are already delivering tangible results. “We hope that more and more people come to understand that cação is shark, and shark meat is toxic, in addition to the fact that sharks are endangered animals,” he said.

Beyond conservation, the project is opening up new economic opportunities for the remote, resource-limited local community. Conservation leaders predict that shark watching—from coastal vantage points on forested mountains, from boats, or even for underwater diving excursions—could grow into a sustainable ecotourism industry that provides consistent alternative income for residents.

Marlene Fernanda do Nascimento Martins, a 35-year-old local community leader who currently fishes and sells ice to support her three children, said the prospect of ecotourism is a welcome development for the area. “We’re a remote community with very limited resources. So anything that comes along that can help us preserve our village is a good thing,” she explained.

For long-time locals, the shift in attitudes has become intergenerational. Reinaldo Dias da Rocha, another resident of the community, noted that his father already encouraged him to avoid hunting sharks, but the project has reinforced the importance of protecting the animals. “We pass the information on to our nephews, to tourists who come to discover this place and enjoy our beautiful beaches, and further labor the point that what we call cação isn’t to be eaten,” he said.