Countries around the world are bracing for a torrid few months as the El Niño weather phenomenon looks set to wreak havoc on shorelines, farmland and ocean ecosystems.

Already, India is grappling with the impacts of one of the driest monsoon seasons on record. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, schools have closed and authorities have advised residents to stay indoors to avoid the toxic smoke from huge wildfires supercharged by El Niño.

But what if we could take the sting out of the tail of El Niño – or even stop it from happening altogether? That’s the hope of physicists, chemists and engineers working on ideas ranging from the outrageously radical to the just-might-work.

One of the most ambitious ideas for halting El Niño is to repurpose a technique called artificial upwelling that was initially conceived to boost the uptake of carbon by the oceans. This form of geoengineering involves pumping cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean up to the surface to encourage the growth of plankton, which would then absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere.

Katharine Ricke at the University of California, San Diego, says artificial upwelling could be used to cool sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific, potentially preventing an El Niño from forming.

But – and it is a big but – the technical feasibility of deploying artificial upwelling on this scale would be a “major, major undertaking”, she says. Ricke has previously investigated whether the approach could be used to cool sea-surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean and found it would require approximately 5.8 million kilometres of pipe, nearly double the total length of all pipelines in the world.

There is also the problem that nobody knows what putting that amount of pipework into the ocean would do to other marine life. “The ecosystem effects of installing ocean pipes at that scale are really not well understood at all,” she says.

Another equally ambitious, but perhaps more promising, approach for preventing El Niño could be to use another geoengineering technique called marine cloud brightening.

The El Niño climate phase occurs when easterly winds weaken, allowing warm water built up in the western Pacific to slosh back across the central and eastern parts of the ocean. Spraying droplets of seawater into the air below low-lying stratocumulus clouds in the Pacific would increase their brightness, reflecting more sunlight back to space. This would then bring down sea-surface temperatures, strengthening trade winds to blow warm water back into the western Pacific and reverse the El Niño pattern.

A study published in July, co-authored by Ricke, concluded that deploying marine cloud brightening in this way would dramatically reduce the strength of an El Niño and push the system back into a neutral state much earlier than normal.

This won’t come in time to prevent the current El Niño, says Jessica Wan at the University of Chicago, a co-author of the research. The technology needed to brighten clouds on this scale doesn’t exist, plus there is no international framework for countries to agree this kind of geoengineering intervention. “It’s not something we could implement for this El Niño or maybe even the next one,” says Wan.

So, for now at least, El Niño cycles aren’t going anywhere – but can we make them more tolerable?

One particularly devastating consequence of the way El Niño turns up the global temperature dial and shifts rain patterns around the world is that it threatens food supplies. The United Nations World Food Programme estimates that 274 million people in 45 countries will be acutely food insecure by the end of 2027, 49 million more than today.

In hot water

Work is under way to develop new breeds of crops capable of withstanding the extreme conditions brought about with El Niño. Rice is a particular priority, says Erik Murchie at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

Murchie is part of a team developing heat-tolerant rice varieties, with trials now ongoing in the Philippines. This is part of a global effort: in 2025, researchers in China reported the discovery of a gene variant that can preserve yield and rice quality during hot nights, one of the major threats to rice yields. Gene-editing or selective breeding could allow this trait in commercial crops, the team says, with the field trials indicating a 31 to 78 per cent greater yield under high temperatures compared with standard rice strains.

Such a goal isn’t a fantasy – in the 1990s, scientists pinpointed a rice gene that allows a traditional rice variety known as FR13A to survive a week of submergence in flood water. The gene has since been introduced into several major rice varieties around the world, making crops more resilient to climate-driven flood risks.

Housing, people and infrastructure are also vulnerable to rising water levels and flooding driven by El Niño. Traditional flood-protection measures are already being deployed, from coastal barricades to temporary barriers. In California, drains are being cleared and sandbags handed out, while residents are being urged to prepare their properties for high winds and flood risk.

But one company has a more drastic idea to protect against flood risk more permanently: raising the height of land. California start-up Terranova has developed a robot that injects a mix of wood slurry into the ground, raising the height of land at risk of flooding from sea-level rise.

The robots drill wells around 12 to 18 metres deep into the ground and then inject the mix, made from wood waste, into the earth. The robotic system can lift up a roughly 4000-square-metre area by about 30 centimetres per day, the firm says. “We’re combining heavy robotics and geotechnical innovation to literally reshape the world,” the firm’s CEO Laurence Allen said in a 2025 statement announcing $7 million of venture capital investment.

However, Nigel Wright at the University of Birmingham in the UK says extensive testing should be done before deploying the technology at a large scale. He queries whether the wood waste would solidify, remain as slurry or decompose underground over the long term. “I would question whether the soil structure would be stable enough over 20 or 30 years to actually support houses,” he says.

Inside the oceans, coral reefs are on the front line of the El Niño crisis. Elevated ocean temperatures caused by El Niño can cause mass coral-bleaching events, in which corals expel the symbiotic algae living in their tissues. This process can severely stress, and ultimately kill, corals.

Shading corals could help. One test of the approach is happening this month: five floating hexagons that block harmful ultraviolet rays are being installed in a small coral nursery in Florida. The plan is to extend this to 100 shading units in June next year, which will be distributed among restoration organisations working across Florida to test their effectiveness at protecting corals and any impact on the long-term health of the ecosystem.

In Australia, an approach that goes even further has been tested. Greg Qiao at the University of Melbourne set out more than a decade ago to create a chemical film that would sit atop agricultural reservoirs to minimise water loss to evaporation. After extensive trials, that idea never came to fruition – but Qiao realised the work could be repurposed for coral reefs.

The aim for a coral reef is to block sunlight, rather than prevent evaporation, so Qiao’s team developed a thin film layer made from calcium carbonate coated with stearic acid. The layer is one molecule thick and designed to sit on the surface of the ocean above a reef. Field trials in 2018 suggested the film reduced light hitting the corals by 30 per cent. “That’s probably enough for us to stop the bleach,” says Qiao. The film would maybe last for only a few hours before dissipating, but that might be enough to offer protection for corals during a period of peak bleaching risk, he says.

Just like with many of the protection efforts against El Niño, coral shading is still in its infancy. There are promising signs that we may one day have a future without such dramatic global swings, but, for now, El Niño is here to stay.