A Super El Niño Is Building. Here's What It Means for Australian Wildlife.

On 16 June 2026, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology officially declared that an El Niño had formed in the Pacific Ocean. NOAA in the United States had made the same call weeks earlier. The forecasts since then have not become more reassuring: models are now showing a 97% chance of the event persisting into early 2027, sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific are already well above normal, and the World Meteorological Organisation expects the event to peak at very strong intensity during the August to October period.

The headlines have used words like "super" and "Godzilla." CSIRO researchers have urged caution about that framing, noting that the strength of an El Niño event doesn't always directly predict its Australian impact, and that some of the worst droughts and fire seasons in the country's history occurred during relatively modest events. But caution about the label doesn't mean the threat is overstated. It means the situation warrants careful attention rather than either panic or dismissal.

Here is what we know, and what Australian wildlife stands to lose if the forecasts prove accurate.

What El Niño Actually Does to Australia

El Niño begins in the tropical Pacific, where unusually warm water develops across the central and eastern ocean. This shifts the atmospheric circulation patterns that normally deliver moisture to Australia's north and east, weakening the trade winds and pushing the rainfall systems that Australia depends on further away. The result, reliably, is hotter and drier conditions across eastern and northern Australia during winter and spring, elevated heatwave risk over summer, and a delayed or weakened monsoon in the north.

The seasonal fingerprint is specific. Winter and spring, the window we are currently entering, carry the strongest drying signal for eastern and northern Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology's seasonal outlook leans strongly toward below-median rainfall across these regions, with above-average temperatures.

Complicating the picture further, the Indian Ocean Dipole, a separate climate driver that can amplify El Niño's effects on Australia, is developing in its positive phase, which is the worst-case combination for Australian drought conditions.

Since January 2026, northeastern New South Wales and southern Queensland have already been drier than average. Soil moisture buffers exist going into spring, but if the event persists into autumn 2027 as forecast, those buffers will not last.

The Murray-Darling Basin

No ecosystem in Australia carries more ecological and cultural significance, and more accumulated stress, than the Murray-Darling Basin. It covers more than one million square kilometres, supports more than 2,000 native plant species, and provides habitat for around 60 waterbird species, 46 native fish species, and numerous threatened mammals, reptiles and frogs.

It is also the ecosystem most directly in El Niño's crosshairs.

Historical data shows that average winter and spring rainfall in the Murray-Darling Basin drops 28% below the long-term mean during El Niño events. Lower rainfall means reduced river flows, shrinking wetlands, and falling water levels in the billabongs and floodplains that many species depend on for breeding and survival.

Waterbird colonies across the basin, including pelicans, straw-necked ibis, egrets, herons and spoonbills, require flooding events to trigger mass nesting. Without adequate inflows, breeding seasons fail entirely. Murray cod, one of the basin's most iconic native fish and already under significant pressure from extraction and altered flow regimes, becomes concentrated in smaller areas as water levels fall, increasing its vulnerability to predation, disease, and the fish kills that accompanied the 2018-19 drought. River red gum forests, which support dozens of dependent species, begin to die back without adequate inundation. Platypus, which require cool, well-oxygenated waterways, face deteriorating conditions across their range.

The basin has not fully recovered from the 2019-20 drought. An El Niño that arrives before that recovery is complete is a compounding event, not a new one.

Fire, and What Came Before

The Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 occurred during a positive Indian Ocean Dipole event rather than a classic El Niño, but they illustrated in devastating detail what extreme fire conditions can do to Australian wildlife. An estimated three billion animals were killed or displaced. Koalas were uplisted to endangered status in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT in the aftermath. Greater gliders, Kangaroo Island dunnarts, and dozens of other species that were already in decline were pushed significantly closer to the brink.

A strong El Niño layered over already-dry conditions creates the same preconditions: dry fuel loads, low humidity, high temperatures, and erratic winds. The catastrophic fires of 1982-83 preceded the Ash Wednesday disaster. The 2002 and 2015 El Niño events both brought severe fire seasons.

Professor Brendan Mackey, a leading Australian climate change expert, put it plainly in June:

"We have lost a lot of natural habitat, and much of what remains is being fragmented. This loss of connectivity is impeding the ability of many animals to escape a bushfire or take refuge during a drought."

That fragmentation is the critical factor. An animal in an intact, connected landscape has options when fire approaches or water disappears. An animal in a fragmented one, surrounded by cleared land, roads, and development, does not.

The Reef, Again

Australia's summer during an El Niño year typically brings elevated sea surface temperatures across the north, which means the Great Barrier Reef faces another round of bleaching pressure before it has had time to adequately recover from previous events.

The reef has experienced mass bleaching in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024.

Recovery from bleaching requires several years of cooler, stable water temperatures. A strong El Niño summer in late 2026 and into 2027 shortens that recovery window further, placing corals under renewed thermal stress before new growth has matured.

Beyond the corals themselves, fish species that shelter and feed among healthy reef structure lose habitat. Sea turtles that graze on reef-associated algae face altered food supplies. Seabirds that depend on reef fish populations see breeding success decline when prey becomes scarce. The reef is not a single organism. It is a system, and when the foundation is compromised, the effects radiate outward through every species that depends on it.

Climate Change Is the Amplifier

El Niño is not caused by climate change. It is a naturally occurring Pacific climate cycle that has operated for thousands of years. But the two are not independent of each other.

Climate change is amplifying El Niño's effects, making extreme weather events more intense and more destructive than they would have been in a cooler world. When El Niño pushes temperatures up, it does so from a higher baseline. When it reduces rainfall, the vegetation and soils receiving that reduced rainfall are already drier and more stressed than they would have been in previous decades. The Met Office has warned that this event increases the likelihood of 2027 becoming the next record-breaking year for global temperatures.

The IFAW's senior director of policy, Matt Collis, described the outlook in June as potentially catastrophic. "The impacts on wildlife, landscapes and communities could be immense," he said. What makes the current moment different from previous El Niño events is not just the event itself, but the state of the ecosystems receiving it. They are more depleted, more fragmented, and carrying more accumulated stress than at any previous point in recorded history.

What Can Be Done

El Niño cannot be prevented. But its impact on wildlife is not entirely fixed.

Intact, connected habitat buffers species against climate extremes. Protected areas that span a gradient of elevation, temperature and moisture give animals somewhere to move when conditions deteriorate in their immediate range. Environmental water allocations in river systems like the Murray-Darling, which direct flows to critical wetland habitats, provide a lifeline for waterbirds and native fish during dry periods. Wildlife corridors that allow movement across landscapes reduce the isolation that makes local extinction more likely.

These are not new ideas. They are the same interventions that conservationists have been advocating for decades. El Niño makes them more urgent, not less.

Individuals can also help in practical ways. The IFAW Wildlife Rescue App connects people with their nearest wildlife rescue group during fire and drought events. Preparing evacuation plans that include animals, supporting local wildlife carers, and reducing fire risk around properties in high-risk areas are all meaningful contributions during an El Niño season.

Three Pieces of Good News

The El Niño outlook is sobering. So it is worth ending with a reminder of what is possible when conservation works.

In Nepal, wild tiger populations have more than tripled in recent years, driven by community-based coexistence programmes and sustained investment in protected area management. It is one of the most significant large predator recoveries in the world, achieved in a densely populated country where the pressures are immense.

In Namibia, rhino poaching has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade, a direct result of community conservation programmes that give local people a financial and practical stake in wildlife protection. The model has now been studied and replicated across southern Africa.

And in northeastern India, WWF has reported elephant populations expanding into new territory in Arunachal Pradesh, a sign of habitat recovery in one of Asia's most biodiverse regions. Elephants are returning to areas they had not been recorded in for decades.

None of these recoveries happened by accident. Each is the result of sustained, specific, well-resourced conservation effort. They are proof that the trajectory is not fixed, even during an El Niño year.