El Niño was linked to famines in Europe in the early modern period

The El Niño weather phenomenon, which influences the climate and economies in regions bordering the Pacific Ocean today, also caused famines in Europe between 1500 and 1800.

During El Niño periods, ocean waters in the central and eastern Pacific become warmer, disrupting trade winds and leading to changes in rainfall patterns around the globe. When waters cool in the same area of the Pacific, it is called La Niña, and these swings between warm and cool ocean phases are known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

The phenomenon has severe impacts on tropical and subtropical regions – especially in Australasia, where it leads to drier weather and often brings droughts and bushfires, and the Americas, where precipitation increases, sometimes catastrophically.

But until now, little scientific attention has been paid to its effect on Europe, say Emile Esmaili at Columbia University in New York City and his colleagues.

Esmaili’s team examined a dataset of 160 European famines during the early modern period in Europe, along with a record of El Niño and La Niña based on tree ring data.

More than 40 per cent of famine onsets in central Europe during this period were associated with El Niño events, they found.

El Niño tends to increase rainfall in this region, which may have led to excessive soil moisture and crop failures, the researchers say.

While El Niño events didn’t directly lead to starvation elsewhere on the continent, they increased the annual likelihood that famines would persist by 24 per cent in all nine European regions the researchers studied.

To explain why, Esmaili and his colleagues also looked at grain and fish prices, finding that El Niño events raised prices for a variety of foods across Europe for several years.

David Ubilava at the University of Sydney in Australia says the ENSO can still cause food insecurity and malnutrition today among low-income households in regions such as South and South-East Asia, Oceania and parts of Africa.

But while El Niño events still also affect Europe’s climate, they would be unlikely to have such a severe impact on food security, he says.

“The same weather effect will have a very different outcome today. Crops are more resilient, production practices are much, much better, weather forecasting went from basically non-existent to pretty accurate and markets are integrated,” says Ubilava.