Using El Niño Impact Analysis to Inform Policy, Early Action and Risk-Informed Planning in Southern Africa
Introduction
The 2023–2024 El Niño event placed severe pressure on food security and rural livelihoods across Southern Africa, intensifying dry spells and delaying the onset of seasonal rains. Countries including Angola, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe faced heightened risks of crop failure, pasture deterioration, and water shortages. To support governments in preparing for and responding to these evolving conditions, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) conducted an El Niño risk analysis across affected countries in the region. The analysis generated evidence-based insights on expected agricultural losses, exposure patterns, and likely livelihood impacts, enabling decision-makers to plan and act earlier and more strategically.
FAO’s El Niño. Anticipatory Action and Response Plan. October 2023-March 2024 combined seasonal climate forecasts, agricultural production data, historical patterns of agricultural losses, food security monitoring, satellite-derived drought indices, and market assessments to analyze drought risk across the region. The findings informed FAO’s and partners’ anticipatory actions in 24 countries globally. It set the contingency planning and sectoral risk-mitigation priorities in Angola, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, while at the regional level, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) used the results to harmonize early-warning messages, strengthen coordination, and improve situational awareness. By integrating forecasts, vulnerability profiles, and real-time monitoring indicators, the analysis enhanced preparedness and risk-informed planning in line with UNDRR’s support for countries to apply disaster and impact data to reinforce early warning, anticipatory action, and climate-resilient development.
The analysis also contributed to mobilizing financing for anticipatory action at both regional and country levels. Opportunities were identified to scale up early action through the activation of crisis modifiers within ongoing resilience programmes, alongside funding from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF). In Zimbabwe, crisis modifiers enabled the reallocation of resources from existing resilience projects to expand anticipatory action interventions in drought-prone districts facing heightened El Niño risk. In parallel, FAO worked closely with OCHA and government counterparts to develop the first inter-agency El Niño CERF anticipatory action frameworks in Zimbabwe and Madagascar. These frameworks drew substantially on the trigger mechanisms and early action protocols already established under FAO Zimbabwe’s drought anticipatory action system. Through these efforts, FAO secured USD 2.6 million to support the protection of agricultural livelihoods in highly exposed and vulnerable districts across both countries. These examples demonstrate how timely, credible, and coordinated impact analysis can directly translate into funding decisions and operational interventions.
Evidence generated from FAO’s anticipatory action interventions during the 2023–2024 El Niño event demonstrated positive impacts on food security, agricultural production and household resilience. Anticipatory actions helped vulnerable rural households protect productive assets, sustain food production and reduce reliance on negative coping strategies during drought conditions. In Mozambique, for example, households that received agricultural inputs, water conservation equipment and training ahead of forecast drought reported lower use of stress and crisis coping mechanisms compared with households that did not receive assistance. Evidence from the region also showed improvements in households’ perceptions of preparedness and recovery capacity following anticipatory interventions. More broadly, FAO’s evidence synthesis found that acting ahead of forecast hazards can be highly cost-effective, with returns of up to USD 3 in avoided losses and added benefits for every USD 1 invested in anticipatory action. A summary of the evidence is available in El Niño 2023–2024: Evidence from FAO’s anticipatory action interventions (FAO, 2025).
Beyond policy influence and financing, the analysis strengthened sectoral processes related to food security, nutrition, and recovery planning. In Mozambique, the evidence informed the June 2024 post-shock Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, supporting the classification of acute food insecurity and its geographic distribution. In Madagascar, El Niño monitoring products contributed to IPC assessments to ensure that expected crop and income losses were reflected in severity analyses. In Tanzania, the analysis underpinned the national rapid seed security assessment, helping authorities identify at-risk areas and plan mitigation measures ahead of the next planting season.
From a UNDRR perspective, the case illustrates the critical value of combining historical disaster impact data with forward-looking seasonal forecasts to inform preparedness, trigger design, and early action. It reinforces the importance of interoperable data ecosystems that can connect hazardous events characteristics, sectoral baselines, and impact information across multiple countries and contexts.
This experience also points to how such analytical processes could be further strengthened through systems such as DELTA Resilience, which can support the systematic collection and organization of historical losses and damages data, linking them with hazardous event records and baseline sector datasets, improving the usability of impact information for preparedness and anticipatory planning. By enabling countries to connect disaster impact information with evolving risk signals consistently and comparably, DELTA Resilience can help institutionalize similar analyses, strengthen evidence-based decision-making, and support more timely and targeted early action.
This case demonstrates how reliable disaster impact information, when integrated with climate and food security monitoring, can reinforce preparedness systems, guide coordinated response, and contribute to reducing future disaster risk across multiple countries.
References:
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2025). El Niño 2023–2024: Evidence from anticipatory action interventions. FAO
https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/4aef7f11-07ce-487e-bfd3-cb9540cfd213
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2024). El Niño: Anticipatory action and response plan (October 2023–March 2024). FAO
https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/04743ce5-c318-4e54-8534-868e5951f337
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2025). Anticipatory action: Annual report 2024. FAO.