Why I asked ten resilience leaders to write about El Niño together
I spent most of July on calls with resilience officers from Maersk, Swiss Re, Syngenta, Roche, Shell, and half a dozen other companies, putting together this advisory. The question we kept returning to is the one this paper is built around: is El Niño a primary focus for the board, or is it left to the risk manager to track?
Boards are informed, that is not in doubt. The harder question is whether they have grasped the scale of an event this unprecedented , and whether risk managers have actually escalated it to the level where decisions and resources can follow.
A pattern we could not ignore
NOAA (the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) puts the probability of El Niño persisting through early spring 2027 at 97 percent, with an 81 percent chance of a very strong event between October and December 2026 , ranking among the largest since 1950 . The Panama Canal Authority issued draft transit restrictions on 1 July that tighten further through August, and said plainly that the worst impacts of a strong El Niño usually land the year after onset. Cocoa forward prices (for future delivery) are trading well above spot , the market's way of telling you the squeeze is still ahead.
We had all seen versions of this before. The 2015 to 2016 event forced South Africa to import roughly half its usual maize crop and left tens of millions across the region food insecure . The 2023 to 2024 event cut cocoa supply from Ivory Coast and Ghana and helped triple global prices . What is new is how foreseeable this event is, and how little of that foresight has reached the people who set budgets.
What our network actually did
That gap is why a small group of us, convened through the UNDRR (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction) Corporate Chief Resilience Officers (CCRO) Network, decided to write a short advisory rather than another long technical report. We used the Resilience Maturity Assessment tool - developed by UNDRR and CCRO network, it provides a comprehensive self-assessment framework designed to evaluate and enhance your organization's capacity to withstand disruptions and adapt to change – as a starting point.
Drawing on its six pillars, we distilled three questions every board should ask:
1. Does this put our people at risk?
2. Does it stop our teams working?
3. Does it stop goods or services moving?
If yes to any, a fourth follows: Does it hit our margin?
One idea sits underneath the whole advisory. A multinational's resilience is not separate from the resilience of the communities, suppliers, and ecosystems it operates within, it is built from it. While global cocoa prices tripled past US$10,000 a tonne, farmgate prices in Ivory Coast and Ghana stayed fixed at a fraction of that, set at the start of the season. The buyers had hedges. The farmers had neither the hedge nor the upside.
What to do
If you sit on a board, in a resilience team, or manage a team that depends on a supplier you have never audited, the advisory asks one thing: can you say, in one sentence, what you would do differently starting Monday?
Ours was: by Friday, put your three most weather exposed inputs or sites on one page, with one name responsible through 2028.
Where this goes next
The UNDRR-convened CCRO Network supports the Resilience World Nexus (RWN) Summit , taking place 6-7 October 2026 at Church House Westminster in London, where we will look more broadly at how businesses and society are building resilience, including how El Niño and other systemic risks can move through supply chains and communities.
Where to find more
The full advisory, with the region-by-region outlook and questions we suggest boards ask their managers, is on PreventionWeb and ARISE (Private Sector Alliance for Disaster Resilient Societies).
Cedrick Moriggi is the Chief Resilience Officer and Founding Partner of GroupResilience.com. He is a senior lecturer at University College London, UK, and Edhec, France, and operates out of London and Geneva.
"On behalf of the UNDRR CCRO network, I would like to thank the co-authors: Mikael Balslev Rasmussen (Maersk), Yann Krattiger (Swiss Re), Laurent Giezendanner (Syngenta), Catherine Cyphus (Marsh Risk) and the Contributors: Christophe Barben (Lombard Odier), Gordon Bedford (Roche), Linda Kromjong (amfori), Mukul Bhola (UNITAR), Elaine Moran (EPFL), James lan Codling (Novo Nordisk), Jean-Marc Rickli (GCSP), David Wall (IATA), Richard FitzHugh (Haleon), Seng-Wei Hooi (Shell).
Thank you all
Cedrick Moriggi (GroupResilience SA)"