gshc2020.com

Even if the forecast El Niño is less strong than some models predict, it will tip many countries over the edge, adding more than a fifth to the 225 million people in 45 countries currently in acute food insecurity, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) warned on Wednesday.

Central and South America, the Caribbean and southern Africa are likely to be worst affected, according to the analysis. In south and south-east Asia there is likely to be less rainfall than usual, which would cause serious problems for agriculture and farmers.

This year’s El Niño – a weather system that develops every few years in the Pacific Ocean and brings changes to rainfall patterns around the world – is shaping up to be the strongest in at least 70 years. Some are calling it a “super El Niño”, though this term is not officially recognised.

What is certain is that its impacts and strength are being strongly affected by the climate crisis. Earlier this year, experts said a strong El Niño could work in tandem with global heating to deliver the hottest year on record either this year or, more likely, in 2027.

Private sector forecasters have already warned of the impact of the gathering El Niño on global food prices, but the report published by the WFP is the first to look closely at global hunger. The WFP said it was hoping to reduce the effects of the extreme weather through early warning systems and “anticipatory” relief efforts, for which at least $80m (£60m) is budgeted.

The consequences will still be far-reaching, as farmers may take more than one season to exhaust their food supplies. In southern Africa, for instance, the main growing season stretches from October this year to March 2027, but it will be about nine months later, during the lean season following the harvest, that the worst impacts will bite.

“The biggest food security impact, in southern Africa, will be during the 2027 to 2028 lean season,” said Richard Choularton, the WFP’s director of the climate and resilience service.

Farmers should be somewhat cushioned by the lingering benefits of last year’s harvest, which was an unusually good one. “At the end of 2025, food prices were in favourable ranges, though there has been upward pressure from the war in the Middle East,” said Jean-Martin Bauer, the WFP’s director of food security.

During the 2015-16 El Niño, about 60 million to 100 million people were affected by acute food insecurity, the term WFP uses to denote hunger that falls below the level of famine. In those years, the WFP was not yet rolling out its updated anticipatory actions, so its experts hope this year’s extreme weather will have a lower impact even if the El Niño is more severe.

However, Choularton said efforts had been hampered by a lack of data, as some collection efforts had been cut for lack of funding.

The WFP’s data covers the 45 countries it works in where baseline estimates for food insecurity are available. There could be additional impacts outside these hard-hit areas.

Food prices could come under pressure across the world, as well as in the 45 countries examined, said Bauer. “This will also depend on the choices that exporting countries make. It’s very important to avoid a situation where large countries stop food exports,” he said. “At the regional level, there could certainly be high prices and [problems with] food access.”

In the UK and Europe, farmers have been warning of the impact of extreme heat and lack of rainfall on their harvests, with retailers braced for higher prices. %!s()

It represents a 21% increase on the number of similar incidents reported in the first half of last year.

It also marks the second highest total of antisemitic hate incidents ever recorded by CST in the first half of any year since the organisation began collecting data in 1984.

Policing Minister Sarah Jones said the numbers were "appalling" and showed people "living in fear just for being who they are".

The incidents logged in the first few months of 2026 include a series of arson attacks against Jewish organisations and synagogues in London.

Four volunteer ambulances were set alight in Golders Green in March. The following month two visibly Jewish men were stabbed nearby, in an attack which was treated as an act of terrorism.

The CST said it recorded noticeable surges in antisemitic incidents following these events, with the highest daily total following the double stabbing on 29 April.

Hatred continues to be directed at British Jews at a higher level than before 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and the war in Gaza began.

The ongoing conflict in the Middle East is one of the factors behind the rise in antisemitism. Some 41% of the incidents recorded by the CST used anti-Jewish language or motive at the same time as making reference to either the conflict, Israel, Palestine, or Hamas.

CST chief executive Mark Gardner said: "These attacks are directed against British Jews but they are also attacks on Britain and our society."

He said they "should concern everyone who cares about Britain and the threats against it, whether state-directed from Iran, or internally driven by Islamist, far-right, far-left, or other ideological extremes."

Separate data released last week revealed that antisemitism is at heightened levels globally.

A report by the J7 Large Communities' Task Force Against Antisemitism found that the UK recorded the biggest rise in antisemitic incidents last year of any country with a major Jewish population outside Israel.

It also found that 2025 was the deadliest year for Jews in the diaspora in more than three decades.

The government's independent adviser on antisemitism, Lord John Mann, said these new CST figures, "demonstrate that anti-Jewish racism in the UK remains at all all-time high and continues to pose a significant threat to our democracy".

He added that he is especially concerned "to see the nature of antisemitism in the UK becoming increasingly violent".

The CST also analyses the types of incidents which occur across different sectors. It found that in the first half of 2026, antisemitism in schools reached the highest level ever recorded for the first six months of any year. It jumped by 59%, from 112 reported incidents in the first half of 2025, to 178 recorded over the same period in 2026.

A government-commissioned independent review into antisemitism in schools and colleges is currently being carried out by Sir David Bell. It is expected to report in the autumn. %!s()

So began what she remembers as the worst night of her life.

Recommended Stories

• list 1 of 3Two killed as Greek firefighting helicopters collide in midair
• list 2 of 3Dangerous summers: How heatwaves and wildfires change life across Europe
• list 3 of 3Photos: Wildfires devastate France and Spain as climate change fuels heat

It was July 9 and the forest fire that raged in Bedar and Los Gallardos, in Almeria, ultimately killed 14 people and saw more than 1,500 people evacuated.

“There were five British people, friends of mine and others in the village, who died in the fire that night. Another close female friend is still fighting for her life in hospital,” she said. “It was probably the most terrifying thing that has ever happened. As we left [as evacuees], there were plumes of white smoke. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, our house is going to burn.'”

On the night of the fire, when they reached the nearby village of Lubrin, they received an “amazing response” and were offered a bed in a woman’s house.

The Almeria fire was among the deadliest blazes in Spain in recent years. As it spread, other forest fires threatened parts of France and Greece.

Chapman returned home days later.

“But what happens is there is a kind of survivor’s guilt,” the 62-year-old retired mediator told Al Jazeera.

‘This can’t happen again’

Bedar, a tiny village of just more than 1,000 residents, has one local police officer.

Chapman said church bells were rung and neighbours warned them to leave. A passing civil guard officer also told them to go the same way.

“This tragedy will never be forgotten. The ninth of July was a dark day for Bedar. What could have gone wrong did go wrong,” she said.

Chapman is part of a residents’ group campaigning to stop a repeat of this tragedy.

“This can’t happen again. We are going to be pressing any political party to put in the protocols to stop this happening again,” she said.

As wildfires have been tearing through forests across Europe, forcing residents to flee and filling the sky with smoke, Ferran Dalmau has been a front-line witness to the chaos they are wreaking across the continent.

An expert firefighting analyst with the Spanish Ministry of Interior, Dalmau has been working with a small team to try to stop the flames destroying more homes and livelihoods and threatening lives.

Though many of the blazes are starting to ease, there are concerns that intense heatwaves raise the risk of more fires.

In southwest France’s Gironde region and the mountainous Var department, wildfires scorched tens of thousands of hectares before stabilising. Officials say the country’s largest blaze since 1949 is now under control but still not fully extinguished.

In central Spain, fires that burned through tens of thousands of hectares near Madrid have been brought under control, allowing many evacuees to return home, even as crews battle flare-ups and new hotspots in provinces including Leon and Caceres.

Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, and scientists warn that rising temperatures, prolonged drought and strong winds are turning southern Europe, especially France and Spain, into a far more flammable landscape, with the number of summer days featuring fire-prone conditions more than doubling since the early 1980s.

Dalmau, a volunteer member of the Forest Fires Assessment and Advisory Team (FAST), saw with his own eyes how huge blazes merged into one at Almorox in Toledo and in Avila – threatening to join a third to create one mammoth fire near Madrid.

“The most recent data was that about 66,000 hectares [163,000 acres] was destroyed, but we think in the end the final area which was burned was between 70,000 and 80,000 [173,000 to 198,000 acres],” he told Al Jazeera.

The three fires that merged into one were caused by “gross carelessness involving heavy machinery, a vehicle that caught fire on a road, and alleged negligence near a housing development, and these factors converged to create the largest fire in our history,” Dalmau said.

As part of a group of experts working on the front line and remotely, he offers rare insight into the battle behind the scenes to try to bring these huge fires under control.

“Our work mainly involves behavioural analysis and supporting decision-making,” he said.

Like everyone else, he gets scared when faced with fires bearing down on him.

“This is a hazard of the job. In our trade, not being afraid can make you reckless. The important thing is not to let fear get the better of you. You must stay calm and put your knowledge into practice,” Dalmau said. “And remain calm in front of the team, of course, to help keep everyone calm. If you panic, you are a danger to yourself and everyone else.”

Courage, he said, is the ability to control fear “and to use it to enhance your situational awareness”.

Dalmau said the Navarre Forestry Agenda, a regional government body dedicated to improving firefighting methods, estimates that it costs $11,534 to firefight each hectare. This means that just combating the recent fires near Madrid has cost up to $923m.

However, this does not include the cost of damage, restoration and environmental and economic impacts, he adds.

‘An absolute disaster’

The Spanish government has not released a figure for the economic cost of fighting the recent fires around the capital.

For Esteban Carrasco, the owner of the Monasterio de Pelayos campsite outside Madrid, the cost was all too obvious.

He said about half of the mobile homes were burned down when the fire reached the site on July 24.

“About 200 campers had to evacuate. Their homes were destroyed. They come here every year to enjoy nature. But the homes on the other side of the road escaped the fire. It was an absolute disaster. It will take ages to rebuild, but at least no one was hurt,” he told Al Jazeera.

In June, Spain announced a forest fire plan which involved 13 ministries, including the army, the forest fire brigades and state security forces, working together.

Despite this, Spain was forced to call for help for water-bombing planes from across Europe when the worst blazes in its history started in July %!s()

Ina Fassbender | Afp | Getty Images

The drought in Europe is so severe that it is jeopardizing countries' economic growth and forcing them to take extreme measures like blowing up riverbeds.

Gripped by a summer of weather extremes, Romania recently shut down its sole working nuclear reactor cooled by the Danube for the first time, with Bucharest even deploying naval forces to carry out underwater detonations to improve water flow.

Images published Monday showed the Romanian navy blasting rocks in controlled explosions in Izvoarele village as part of a push to divert a higher volume of water toward the cooling systems of the Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant.

Low water levels on the Danube have also threatened to close Hungary's Paks nuclear plant, which supplies around 40% of the country's electricity, and forced Serbia to cut hydropower generation.

Why low Rhine levels threaten Germany's economy

In Germany, the water levels on the Rhine River, a crucial waterway in Europe's economic heartland, have fallen to their lowest levels in nearly 150 years, posing a risk to the German economy and further disrupting supply chains.

The water level at Kaub, a key choke point for vessels transiting to southern Germany and Switzerland, fell to 24 centimeters on Monday and Tuesday, reflecting its lowest level since records began in 1880, with forecasts of even lower levels toward the end of this week, according to official data compiled by ETH Zurich.

That's far below the critical level of 78 centimeters at the Kaub gauge for navigation on the Rhine. Transport is still possible below this threshold, but cargo barges must be less heavily loaded, and freight transport costs and low-water surcharges rise sharply.

"Major rivers like the Rhine and Danube are critical trade corridors and sources of water for industry and energy generation, so when water levels fall, the effects extend far beyond the waterways themselves," Liz Saccoccia, water security lead at the World Resources Institute, told CNBC by email.

A controlled underwater explosion is pictured on the riverbed of the Danube River in Izvoarele village, on August 3, 2026. The blast aimed at deepening the channel and diverting a higher volume of water toward the cooling systems of the Cernavoda Nuclear Power Plant.

Daniel Mihailescu | Afp | Getty Images

"We're already seeing that happen. Nuclear plants in Hungary, Romania and France, along with hydropower facilities in Serbia, have already had to reduce electricity generation because there isn't enough water for cooling or driving turbines, increasing the risk of blackouts and costly electricity imports," Saccoccia said.

"Along the Danube, low water levels have prevented farmers from shipping their crops and stopped cruise ships from reaching ports such as Budapest. These are early examples of how increasingly unreliable water supplies can ripple through the economy, affecting trade, energy security, supply chains and local businesses," she added.

What low water levels mean for freight and supply chains

The issue shines a light on a critically important environmental issue: water scarcity.

The issue is especially acute across southern Europe, where around 30% of the population is known to be situated in areas with permanent water stress: when water demand exceeds the available supply.

In economic terms, the effects of low water levels on the Rhine could be enough to dampen German gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 0.2 percent in the third quarter, according to Stefan Kooths, professor of economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW).

watch now

"Since water levels are unlikely to rise sharply back above the critical threshold in early August, transport capacity is likely to remain affected by the low water levels for some time in the coming month as well," Kooths told CNBC by email.

"The loss in value added can be roughly estimated at 1 to 2 billion euros ($1.15 billion to $2.3 billion) in the third quarter," he added.

How climate change is increasing Europe's drought risk

Felix Schmidt, senior economist at the private German bank Berenberg, said companies in Europe's traditional growth engine had likely not been caught by surprise by the Rhine's low water levels because climate change means this has become a recurring challenge.

Businesses have prepared by either stocking up on inventories or diverting the transport of some goods via rail or road, although Schmidt acknowledged that freight rates were currently going "through the roof," exacerbating inflationary worries.

"Given that Germany is growing very little, obviously, if we grow 0.1 instead of 0.2 then this means we lose half of the growth, if you want to frame it like that," Schmidt told CNBC in a phone interview.

The German economy expanded by 0.2% in the second quarter, compared to the previous three-month period. That followed an upwardly revised 0.4% quarter-on-quarter increase in the first quarter.

A view of the Paks Power Plant from the Danube embankment in the town across the river on July 31, 2026 in Dunaszentbenedek, Hungary.

Janos Kummer | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Schmidt described drying rivers as just one expression of Germany's economic struggle amid the intensifying climate crisis.

"Water levels are obviously one thing but we had this heat wave in Germany a couple of weeks back, impacting big parts of northern Europe, which brings down productivity. You have infrastructure which gets destroyed by the heat. You have energy supply, which is affected, like the nuclear plants being shut down in Hungary, France and Switzerland," Schmidt said.

"You also have the catastrophic development like the fires sweeping now in southern Europe … So, it's affecting the economy in many, many ways," he added. %!s()

Many felt the "tank" was a reference to vehicles deployed to crush pro-democracy protesters and the promotion sparked a mass boycott movement.

Starbucks quickly rolled it back, saying it was unintentional but civic groups filed a criminal complaint against the company, demanding the police investigate it for defaming victims of the military dictatorship.

Shinsegae Group, which operates Starbucks in Korea, said it had launched an internal investigation into the campaign and concluded that the mistake was unintentional.

It added the team that had planned the promotion did not draw the connection to the historical event, and the upper management had failed to spot it as well.

In June, Starbucks stores across the country closed for half a day to allow staff to attend history lessons.

Shinsegae apologised for the "inappropriate marketing" and said that the Tank Day controversy had led to serious decline in Starbucks sales in South Korea - one of the coffee chain's largest markets.

The company also sacked its chief executive.

Reports estimate that hundreds were killed by the forces of military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, on what is now remembered as a day of national trauma for South Koreans - and a day held sacred by many in the country.

In addition, promotional material for the tumbler used the phrase "tak on the table!", mimicking the sound of an object being slapped on a surface.

But "tak" was also the word used in a controversial statement given by police in 1987, describing the death of a student activist in custody.

South Korea's president Lee Jae Myung was among those who criticised the campaign, saying it "insults the victims and the bloody struggle" of Gwangju residents.

The scandal, which broke during the local elections season, also became a prominent talking point between the two major parties.

While the internal ministry under Lee announced a government-level boycott of Starbucks, the opposition leader responded by holding up a Starbucks cup during a speech and accusing the government of overreach.

Since then, Starbucks cups have been embraced by right-wing pundits as a symbol of opposition to the Lee Jae-myung government. It has also made appearances in right-wing rallies and livestreams. %!s()