In 1974, Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie was thrown out of power by a Marxist military junta. He had ruled for more than four decades.
The causes were mainly political: a mutinous army, a fractured elite, a starving population fed up with a government that seemed not to care.
But a study on Ethiopia’s history of climate-linked displacement found something else lurking behind the unrest: El Niño. The drought and famine that helped bring down Selassie were part of a longer chain, one that repeated with further El Niño events in 1976–77, 1982–83, and 1991–93.
Ethiopia is unusual, the researchers noted, because you can trace its population movements almost directly back to a change in ocean temperature thousands of miles away.
That’s the strange thing about El Niño. Every two to seven years, a patch of the tropical Pacific warms up, and the effects ripple out across the planet. In Africa, they show up as floods in Somalia, drought in Zimbabwe, or dry taps in Cape Town. If you look at the past 50 years, El Niño has had disastrous effects on the continent.
Scientists don’t like to generalize about it because El Niño doesn’t hit Africa the same way twice. A recent review in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment revealed that its influence varies by season, by region, by decade. But a rough pattern holds. East Africa usually gets wetter. Southern Africa and the Sahel usually dry out. Four of the strongest El Niños since the 1970s — 1982–83, 1997–98, 2015–16, and 2023–24 — show how far apart those two experiences can be.
1982–83: Drought Across the Sahel and Ethiopia’s Deepening Crisis
The first of the modern “super” El Niños hit in 1982–83. Its effects didn’t fade quickly. Researchers tracing its atmospheric fingerprint found that leftover warm anomalies from that El Niño drove the 1983 drought in the western Sahel, one of the driest summers of the century there. Crops failed and livestock died from Senegal and Mali all the way to Chad and Sudan.
In Ethiopia, the drought fed straight into the famine of 1983–85. An estimated one million people died. A review of meteorological drought across the continent found the 1982–83 event made already-dry conditions in southern Africa even worse — one of only a handful of years where researchers can point to El Niño and say, clearly, that this made the drought severe and widespread.
1997–98: Catastrophic Floods in the Horn, Near-Miss in the South
If 1982–83 was a story about drought, 1997–98 was a story about water. This was one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded, and in East Africa it meant rain like nobody had seen in decades. Researchers documenting the event found that parts of north-eastern Kenya and southern Somalia got rainfall 60 to 100 times heavier than normal, the heaviest since 1961. In Somalia, the Juba and Shabelle rivers overflowed. Floods that followed were the worst in decades, killing roughly 2,000 people and displacing another 250,000. Housing and roads were wrecked. About a third of the country’s expected cereal harvest was lost.
Kenya didn’t fare much better. Floodwaters cut off roads, triggered landslides in the highlands, and disrupted daily life in the capital. Researchers studying flooding in Nairobi’s informal settlements later found that the 1997–98 rains hit agriculture, water supply, health, and transport all at once.
Then came the disease. Standing water is a breeding ground, and Rift Valley Fever exploded in the region alongside cholera and malaria. Researchers later counted around 89,000 human cases of Rift Valley Fever in Kenya and Somalia, with 200 to 250 deaths and heavy livestock losses. A retrospective on the event put the global toll at more than 22,000 lives and over $36 billion in damage, a large share of it in East Africa. Southern Africa, oddly, escaped that year. The Angola Low, which usually weakens and brings drought, stayed strong instead. Zimbabwe and Zambia were spared the worst.
2015–16: South Africa’s Worst Drought in a Century and a Region in Crisis
Nearly two decades later, El Niño returned, and this time southern Africa took the hit. Climate scientists analyzing the event called it the most intense drought in the region’s 116-year rainfall record, with a return period they put at more than 200 years. Parts of South Africa’s interior and east recorded their lowest rainfall since at least 1950.
The damage looked different from place to place. Cape Town had three dry winters in a row from 2015 to 2017, and as the drought dragged on, the city edged toward what became known as the “Day Zero” water crisis. Officials warned the taps could run dry for 3.7 million people. Residents were eventually told to get by on 50 liters a day. In Zambia and Botswana, researchers studying Lusaka and Gaborone found reservoirs so depleted that officials had to ration hydroelectric power in one city and municipal water in the other. In Zimbabwe, the drought hammered the maize belt. Economists studying the country’s yields found that 11 of the 13 El Niño seasons on record showed a drop in maize output.
Across the wider region, the human cost was staggering. Economists studying the crisis found food crop production fell by as much as 66% in some countries. An estimated 40 million people ended up acutely food insecure, and more than 20 million needed emergency aid by mid-2016.
2023–24: The Pattern Repeats, Sharper Still
The most recent big El Niño made clear this isn’t going away. Humanitarian agencies tracking the 2023–24 drought reported that Southern Africa saw its worst mid-season dry spell in over a century, with the lowest mid-season rainfall in 40 years. Six countries; Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe declared states of emergency, a rare show of coordinated alarm. More than 9,000 cattle died from drought-related causes between October 2023 and February 2024, forcing families to sell off what livestock they had left, often at a loss. In Malawi, about 4.4 million people, roughly a fifth of the population, faced crisis-level food insecurity. In southern Madagascar, aid groups expected conditions to worsen into crisis by October, even as other parts of the country flooded at the same time. El Niño rarely hits a country evenly.
In West Africa, researchers studying the same event found that 2023’s El Niño brought record heat, more wildfires, floods, heatwaves, and severe drought, on top of agricultural systems already strained by conflict and poverty across the Sahel and Guinea Coast.
Another El Niño Coming, It’s the Same Story
With the coming El Niño, some regions will face drought while others will experience excessive rainfall. Southern Africa, including parts of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa, could see below-average rainfall.
Parts of West Africa and the Sahel could also experience reduced rainfall. In contrast, the Horn of Africa and parts of East Africa, including Somalia, Kenya, southern Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania, could receive above-average rainfall during the October–December season, increasing the risk of flooding, landslides, and crop damage.
What could the impact be in monetary losses? Enormous. The African Development Bank warned that the continent could face up to a $20 billion economic hit.
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IMAGE CREDIT: WFP