This article is the Second Part of: El Niño forces us to face up to an unwelcome truth. Do we even care?
We have the forecasts. We have historical evidence. We know where the operational vulnerabilities are. Why do we still behave as though predictable climate disruption is an unforeseen event?
Now, in September 2026 our current El Niño is making front-page headlines again; the BBC running only this week a headline reading: “World’s oceans hit highest temperature on record as El Niño grows.”
It continues: “What is especially concerning to scientists is that the oceans are already so hot when the natural El Niño weather phenomenon is still some way off its expected peak.”
The article quoted Dr Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus European climate change service saying: “The increasing frequency of marine heatwaves is already putting increasing pressure on marine ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.”
So we have all the scary headlines, predictions and conclusive facts of how our planet is in dire peril from the punishment we are giving it. We also have the good intentions and talk of what to do next. But let’s face it: it’s too slow. And too many people have vested interests in keeping climate change protection and the rollout of clean fuels from happening quickly.
Is mankind too selfish to act quickly enough to protect our planet?
As an industry, we have an uncomfortable habit of noticing nature’s warnings only when they become operational problems. Until then, the red flags are visible, discussed and often extensively analysed: but too rarely acted upon. Then disruption arrives, and suddenly we are in crisis mode.
Shipping is supposed to be good at uncertainty. Geopolitical conflict, economic shocks, pandemics, labour disputes and broken supply chains are hardly unfamiliar territory. Adaptability is almost part of the industry’s identity. Yet climate repeatedly finds the weak spots in that resilience.
The forthcoming El Niño event forecast for 2026–2027 could increase the risk of droughts, floods, heatwaves and operational disruption across large parts of the world. The science is hardly whispering to us: there is a 90% chance of El Niño developing in the next couple of months, according to António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. And the consequences are already moving from forecast to operational reality.
On 7 July, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) announced two forthcoming draught restrictions in response to present and projected Gatun Lake levels. From 24 July 2026, the maximum authorised draft for vessels transiting the Neopanamax Locks will be 14.94 meters in Tropical Fresh Water (TFW), reducing again to 14.78 meters from 15 August. That sounds like a relatively small adjustment until you translate centimetres into cargo.
Seatrade Maritime News reported that the restrictions will mean less cargo and reduced revenue for container carriers using the canal. According to consultant Dynamar, every 10cm reduction in draught for a typical 366 x 51 metre, 14,000 teu vessel with a capacity of 153,000 tonnes could reduce its ‘effective deadweight’ by approximately 1%.
So perhaps we need to stop describing El Niño itself as the problem.
We know what El Niño can do. We know it can bring extreme weather and temperature shifts, disrupt agriculture and ecosystems, affect human health and place enormous strain on infrastructure. What should concern us is our continued willingness to treat a largely predictable threat as though it arrived without warning.
NOAA has confirmed that El Niño conditions are developing in the tropical Pacific, with sea surface temperatures rising sharply in recent months. Its June outlook estimates a 63% chance of a very strong El Niño between November and January, potentially putting it among the largest events recorded since 1950.
The World Meteorological Organization’s latest seasonal outlook points to an 80% probability of El Niño conditions during June–August 2026, while some US and European forecasting models suggest tropical Pacific temperatures could rise more than 3°C above average by the end of the year.
Nature.com has suggested the coming El Niño could therefore peak more strongly than the previous event.
Then there is the economic exposure. Current modelling suggests increasingly intense El Niño cycles could contribute to cumulative global income losses of as much as $84 trillion by the end of the century if adaptation fails to keep pace.
According to the Observer Research Foundation Middle East, a severe event could disrupt agricultural output across Southeast Asia, add pressure to energy systems in India and China, reduce maritime transit capacity and increase demand for LNG and coal during periods of extreme heat.
And these are only the things we can attempt to predict.
The Met Office has cautioned that the impact on sea levels will depend on both the strength and duration of the forthcoming El Niño and wider global climate conditions.
Nature, in other words, is not going to provide us with a convenient operational timetable.
What happens to shipping costs?
Nobody appears willing to put a definitive number on what the forthcoming El Niño could cost shipping. But we do know what happened last time – and that should be enough to concentrate minds.
The previous El Niño began in June 2023 and continued into early 2024. Its impact travelled through global supply chains, but the Panama Canal provided perhaps the clearest demonstration of what happens when climate and maritime infrastructure collide.
Drought reduced Gatún Lake water levels, forcing the Panama Canal Authority to restrict vessel drafts and cut daily transits. Vessel movements that would normally have numbered around 36–38 ships fell on some days to just 22–24.
Ships waited three or four weeks for transit slots. Booking fees soared, with some operators paying between $500,000 and more than $1 million simply to secure passage. More than $200 million in additional freight costs were ultimately passed on to shippers. Some bulk carriers diverted around Cape Horn instead, adding between 8,000 and 10,000 nautical miles to individual voyages, together with the inevitable additional fuel consumption, costs and delays throughout global supply chains.
Those numbers matter. But there is another lesson from Panama that matters even more.
We cannot keep calling predictable events surprises
The warning was there. Water levels had been falling for months. Forecasts existed. Risks were understood. Rising booking-slot prices were providing their own market signal. Ships were already waiting weeks.
Yet significant parts of the industry continued behaving as though somebody else would suffer the consequences.
That is not a failure of forecasting. It is a failure of behaviour. There is an awkward incentive at work here. Spend money preparing for something that does not happen and somebody may question the investment. Wait until the disruption arrives and it becomes much easier to blame circumstances outside your control.
Which behaviour does that encourage?
The next El Niño is unlikely to teach us something fundamentally new. Instead, it will expose the difference between organisations that converted warnings into action and those that convinced themselves there was still plenty of time.
That matters because climate disruption can no longer sensibly be treated as an exceptional event sitting outside normal maritime operations. Increasingly, it is part of normal maritime operations.
Ports across Europe quite rightly put decarbonisation high on their strategic agendas. But resilience needs the same seriousness. Sustainability commitments mean very little if the operational consequences of a changing climate remain something we deal with afterwards.
Perhaps the question should be more uncomfortable: are we building ports and supply chains capable of handling real-world disruption, or simply producing strategies that look good in annual reports?
Resilience happens at 06:00, not in the boardroom
For a port, resilience is not an ESG statement or a slide in a presentation.
It is knowing at 06:00 that a vessel arriving four hours late is going to create a crane conflict at 14:00, and doing something about it before 14:00 arrives. It means understanding what changing weather conditions will do to vessel arrivals, berth utilisation, cargo flows and emissions while there is still time to change the outcome.
Some ports already operate this way. Many do not.
We frequently hear that greater collaboration will solve the problem. That sounds good, but we also need to recognise how the maritime industry actually works. Ports compete. Shipping lines compete. Commercial interests do not disappear simply because sharing information would produce a better collective outcome.
Waiting for everyone spontaneously to become more transparent is not a resilience strategy.
Shared digital infrastructure offers a more realistic route forward – not because technology magically removes climate risk, but because it can make informed decisions easier and faster when circumstances start changing. That thinking sits behind EmissionInsider. Ports do not need another dashboard for the sake of having another dashboard. They need to understand what is happening operationally and environmentally while they can still influence it.
Extreme weather does much more than move a vessel’s ETA. It creates congestion, changes traffic flows, increases waiting and can generate emissions hotspots across port operations.
Many ports can explain what their emissions looked like last quarter. Far fewer can tell you what is happening this morning. There is a huge difference between those two capabilities. Managing disruption retrospectively tells you what went wrong. Operational visibility gives you an opportunity to stop it going wrong in the first place. It cannot remove disruption. What it can do is reveal emerging pressure points sooner, show the likely consequences of operational decisions and give ports an opportunity to intervene before friction becomes failure. That, to me, is what resilience should mean: not another target, but an operational capability.
Seeing the problem is only half the answer
Of course, knowing something is going wrong has limited value if nobody can coordinate a response.
When weather delays vessel arrivals, changes schedules or creates congestion across a port network, individual decisions stop being individual. One late vessel affects berth availability; that affects cranes and services; those changes affect other vessels and before long a single disruption is travelling through the wider supply chain.
This is why call planning matters. PortXchange Synchronizer allows shipping lines, agents, terminals and service providers to exchange planned, expected and realised times through standardised data exchange. Instead of different organisations making decisions from disconnected assumptions, stakeholders can work from a shared operational picture.
Efficiency is one benefit. In an increasingly disrupted climate, resilience may prove the more important one.
The ports best equipped to handle the next disruption will not automatically be those with the deepest pockets or greatest resources. They will increasingly be those capable of understanding changing conditions and making good decisions quickly with the best information available.
We know this can produce tangible results. A recently completed PortXchange pilot involving shipping companies, terminals and agencies generated a 20% reduction in waiting time.
But now we reach the part of the argument nobody particularly enjoys. This costs money. And some of that investment will not produce an immediate financial return. In fact, much of it will not. Yet continually applying another sticking plaster after every El Niño has a cost too, and that cost is not distributed fairly.
We in first-world nations can absorb disruption far more easily than countries already surviving on a knife edge. Elsewhere, climate disruption can destroy economies, intensify famine and civil instability, and take away habitable land through erosion.
So I come back to the uncomfortable question: how much do the countries and people capable of driving change genuinely care?
Do we care only about the next quarter, the next election or perhaps the next 40 or 50 years of our own lives? Or are we prepared to make decisions whose biggest beneficiaries may be people we will never meet and generations we will never see?
At some point, money cannot remain the only measure of return.
Protecting a planet we are steadily stripping bare requires investment whose value cannot always be demonstrated on next year’s balance sheet. It requires us to stop looking two feet ahead. Governments clearly have enormous power over the speed of that change. But we elect those governments. The question therefore comes back to every one of us: do we vote and act solely according to what benefits us today, or are we capable of thinking globally and beyond our own lifetimes?
El Niño will come and go. This problem will not.
Climate-related disruption is becoming a recurring feature of maritime operations rather than an occasional exception. An industry that has always prided itself on navigating uncertainty now has to apply that same skill to the climate.
The next El Niño is not a black swan. It is a warning delivered in advance.
And if we are surprised by the consequences yet again, we should stop blaming the weather.
