El Niño global weather impacts are already visible in Indonesia, where the country is battling its worst wildfire season since 2015. Since January, at least 895,657 hectares have burned, while smoke from the fires has spread across Sumatra and Kalimantan.
The burned area is nearly six times the size of Greater London and more than twice the area burned last year without the influence of El Niño. People in Indonesia have faced school closures, hospital admissions and respiratory illness as the haze thickened, including around 175,000 people and more than 40,000 cases involving toddlers.
Indonesia and the wildfire toll
Indonesia’s fires give the clearest sign of how the weather pattern is changing conditions on the ground. Millions of people in Sumatra and Kalimantan have been exposed to toxic haze, and the burned area has already outpaced a full year without El Niño’s added drying and heat.
The World Meteorological Agency says the record-breaking El Niño will strengthen further and persist until at least 2027. That extends the period in which Indonesia, India and the United States are facing droughts, floods and heatwaves in line with projections that extreme weather will be supercharged.
Eastern Pacific hurricane season
The eastern Pacific is already more active than a typical full season, even with two months left to go. So far this season there have been 22 named storms, 12 hurricanes and 10 major hurricanes.
Hurricane Polo intensified rapidly, producing wind gusts of 180 mph, or 285 kmh, and drawing strength from the very warm waters linked to El Niño. Hurricane Polo was one of three hurricanes churning in the same basin at the same time, alongside Odalys and Nolo.
What comes next for El Niño
El Niño adds higher ocean temperatures and weaker winds high in the atmosphere, which helps storms gain strength in the eastern Pacific while drying and heating parts of Indonesia. That combination has already left burned land in the hundreds of thousands of hectares and pushed respiratory illness into the tens of thousands.
For people in Indonesia, the immediate question is not whether the pattern is real, but how much more land will burn before the weather eases. The World Meteorological Agency expects the pattern to keep strengthening, and that means the pressure on forests, schools and hospitals is unlikely to fade quickly.
