One of the strongest El Niños on record is taking shape, but its biggest supply chain threat may be how differently it affects the world.
One climate pattern, many supply chain risks
While El Niño can suppress hurricanes in the Atlantic, it can intensify weather risks elsewhere. One sourcing region may face drought as another prepares for flooding. Heat and wildfire risk can rise even as storm activity falls.
For global supply chains built across all of those regions, there is no single El Niño forecast to prepare for.
The latest forecasts give supply chain leaders good reason to pay attention now. El Niño is strengthening earlier than usual, and there is now a greater than 90% chance that it becomes a very strong event through fall and winter, when El Niño typically exerts more influence over global weather.
The effects were already beginning to emerge by mid-September. Across North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, more than 5.2 million people were affected, exposed to risk, or experiencing acute food insecurity amid drought, wildfire, and flooding conditions. As of September 18, eight countries or territories had issued emergency declarations or alerts related to El Niño-associated threats.
At the same time, the Atlantic hurricane season had been historically quiet. More than halfway through September, the basin had yet to produce a hurricane, while tropical activity in the Pacific had been considerably stronger.
It is a striking example of what makes El Niño difficult from a supply chain perspective: the pattern of exposure changes across a global network where suppliers, manufacturing capacity, raw materials, utilities, and transportation infrastructure are already tightly interconnected.
Resilinc’s 2025 EventWatchᴬᴵ data showed that extreme weather disruptions increased 33% year over year, while flood-related disruptions rose 34%. This year’s El Niño is developing on top of an operating environment where weather-related disruptions were already becoming more frequent.
Where El Niño meets the supply chain
Seasonal climate forecasts are broad by design, while supply chain risk is highly specific.
Knowing that a region faces an elevated probability of drought or flooding does not tell a company whether production is at risk. Teams have to understand what manufacturing capacity and material dependencies sit inside the affected region and how easily they can be replaced.
Drought, for example, can constrain water-intensive manufacturing or reduce agricultural and raw-material output without causing physical damage to a facility.
Flooding creates a different problem when production continues but inbound materials cannot reach the site or finished goods cannot move through the usual road, rail, or port network.
Extreme heat and wildfire can affect utility reliability and access to industrial sites, while even a temporary power interruption can force some manufacturers to discard work in process or restart equipment before production resumes.
Look beyond Tier 1 for hidden weather exposure
Those consequences become harder to see below Tier 1.
A direct supplier in North America may rely on a specialty material produced at one site in Asia. A component that appears dual sourced may still carry concentration risk when both suppliers depend on the same upstream manufacturer.
A supplier may operate several factories, while only one is qualified to manufacture the specific part a customer buys.
For critical parts and materials, teams need to know which sites actually support production, how much inventory is available downstream, and how long recovery would take.
An alternate supplier that requires months of qualification will not solve a shortage expected in a few weeks, while an alternate facility without available capacity provides little practical redundancy.
See how visibility changed the outcome during Hurricane Maria
This level of visibility changed the outcome for one multinational biopharmaceutical company when Category 5 Hurricane Maria approached Puerto Rico in 2017.
The company had already mapped its network to the part-site level and identified two supplier sites in the hurricane’s path that supported 30 parts and materials, including IV bags essential to patient care.
Within four days of Maria making landfall, the company had secured $1.5 million in IV bag inventory and ultimately maintained care for 100% of its patients.
The forecast provided advance warning. Knowing which parts depended on the sites in its path gave the company something useful to do with it.
Use the lead time El Niño is giving us
The unusual strength and early development of this El Niño gives supply chain teams time to examine where weather exposure overlaps with dependencies that have limited recovery options.
That review should go beyond supplier location.
For a sole-source component manufactured in a drought-prone region, teams should understand the site’s dependence on local water supplies and how long existing inventory could cover reduced production.
Where flooding is the concern, alternate logistics routes need to be tested for actual feasibility, including whether suppliers can reach another port and whether sufficient transportation capacity would be available during a regional disruption.
Check how much time your inventory really buys you
Inventory should also be examined beyond Tier 1.
A downstream supplier may continue shipping from stock after production has already stopped further upstream, which means the eventual constraint can remain hidden while the available response window gets shorter.
The question is not simply how much inventory exists. It is how long that inventory can protect production while an upstream disruption is resolved or an alternative is qualified.
Model where your response window is narrowest
Scenario analysis can help determine where that window is particularly narrow. Modeling the loss of a critical site against inventory and expected recovery time can show when shortages would reach production and whether additional inventory or alternate capacity would meaningfully reduce the exposure.
El Niño also requires a longer planning horizon than an individual storm. Its influence can persist for months, which means different parts of the same supply network may encounter different weather stresses at different points in the cycle.
Knowing where the network has little room for error gives teams a much more focused set of dependencies to monitor as conditions develop.
Turn emerging weather signals into action
Once individual weather events begin developing, preparation shifts into active monitoring and response.
SC Watch continuously monitors global disruption signals and connects emerging events to a company’s supply chain, helping teams focus on supplier locations with potential impact rather than sorting through every weather alert in an affected region.
SC Monitor extends that context into the multi-tier network. When an affected facility belongs to a sub-tier supplier, teams can understand which parts rely on that site and where the dependency flows downstream. This can also expose cases where several direct suppliers ultimately depend on the same upstream source.
Agentic AI helps keep that picture current as supplier status and recovery conditions change.
Utility restoration, material availability, transportation access, and production recovery can progress on very different timelines after a major weather event. Resilinc’s AI agents can evaluate those developments against supply chain data and help teams identify where changing conditions require attention while supporting supplier engagement and mitigation workflows.
With a greater than 90% chance of a very strong El Niño through fall and winter, the coming months offer supply chain teams valuable preparation time. Understanding critical part-site dependencies now means emerging weather intelligence can be used to make operational decisions rather than to begin discovering the network after disruption has already occurred.
Prepare your supply chain for the 2026 hurricane season
El Niño is one part of the extreme weather environment supply chain teams are navigating this year. Hurricane season raises many of the same questions around supplier preparedness, site exposure, available inventory, and recovery planning when critical dependencies sit in storm-prone regions.
Resilinc’s 2026 Hurricane Season Preparedness and Supply Chain Forecast provides the latest hurricane outlook along with supply chain risk analysis and preparedness guidance to help organizations understand potential exposure and strengthen readiness before severe weather puts critical suppliers to the test.
