Author and chief editor: Vitaly Kisterny 30.08.2026 13:40:00

The anomalous warming of Pacific Ocean waters, known as El Niño, threatens the global economy with losses in the trillions of dollars. It is already provoking a logistics crisis in the Panama Canal.

According to The Wall Street Journal and climate scientists' research, the main blow will fall on tropical countries.

Currently, ocean temperatures continue to break historical records.

Photo: © Belnovosti / US dollars. Author Vitaly Kisterny. Climate scientists are sounding the alarm: the current climate cycle is ceasing to be merely a weather anomaly, turning into a full-fledged macroeconomic factor. According to estimates by Christopher Callahan, a researcher at Indiana University, the consequences of the current El Niño could be "quite serious" for global GDP, leading to loss of income in amounts with thirteen zeros.

The most vulnerable are economies located in the tropical belt, where the link between ocean temperature and labor productivity is most direct.

However, financial losses are only the tip of the iceberg. WSJ draws attention to quite tangible consequences for global trade already now. We are talking about the Panama Canal, a key artery connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Due to an anomalous drought triggered by changing climate patterns, the water level in Lake Gatun, which feeds the canal's locks, has dropped critically. The canal administration was forced to impose strict restrictions on the number of transiting vessels.

The result was not long in coming: if previously the standard price for transit was about 800 thousand dollars, now, amid a shortage of slots, rates have soared to 2.5 million dollars per passage. This will inevitably affect the cost of transported goods.

It is worth noting that the current intensity of the phenomenon is not a coincidence. The press service of the University of Michigan previously reported that over the past forty years the strength of El Niño has grown by 40%, bringing it to peak values for the current millennium.

To understand the nature of what is happening, it is worth recalling that El Niño (translated from Spanish as "boy") and its "sister" La Niña ("girl") are fluctuations in the temperature of the upper layers of water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. If La Niña brings cooling, then El Niño, on the contrary, is associated with a sharp warming of the water.

This seemingly local temperature fluctuation triggers a chain reaction in the atmosphere: wind directions and ocean currents change, leading to droughts in some regions and devastating floods in others. A striking historical example is the "millennium drought" in Australia, which lasted from 1996 to 2010 and was halted only by the arrival of a new phase of La Niña.

Now, as ocean waters continue to warm against the backdrop of overall global warming, national economies have to learn to calculate losses not only from hurricanes but also from the very existence of climate cycles amplified by human activity.

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