THE latest advisory that a developing El Niño threatens a drier and hotter 2026, should not read as a surprise; it should read as a deadline.
The World Meteorological Organization now expresses high confidence that El Niño conditions will emerge between mid-2026 and persist into 2027, with at least a 50 per cent chance of a “super” event rivalling 1997–98 and 2015–16.
The Caribbean Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology and the UWI Climate Studies Group have already urged regional governments, businesses and farmers to brace for a “multi-hazard regime” in which heat, drought and marine impacts compound one another.
For a low-lying, agriculture-dependent country such as ours, the question is no longer whether to prepare, but how seriously.
Guyana’s vulnerability is structural. The Civil Defence Commission notes that our economy still leans heavily on agriculture, that we depend on two rainy seasons, and that national water storage and management are being developed.
The government must move ahead of the curve. The National Drainage and Irrigation Authority should publish, now, a conservancy-by-conservancy water budget for the rest of 2026, with public triggers for pump activation, salinity testing, and rationing.
Guyana Water Inc. should accelerate its hinterland well-drilling programme and pre-position tanks in Regions One, Seven, Eight and Nine, where Indigenous communities feel droughts first and hardest.
The Guyana Rice Development Board and farmers’ associations need an early planting calendar that hedges the second crop against an October–November rainfall deficit. And the Ministries of Health and Local Government must dust off heat-stress and bush-fire protocols before, not after, the first hospital admission or cane-field blaze.
There is also a communications duty. As a nation increasingly fluent in oil revenues, we cannot afford climate illiteracy. Hydromet bulletins should be translated into plain language and pushed through radio, WhatsApp and village councils, not buried on websites. Citizens, in turn, must treat water as the strategic asset it is; fix the leaking standpipe, harvest the rain that still falls, and challenge the neighbour hosing down a yard.
El Niño is a forecast, not a fate. Guyana has the conservancies, the data, the revenues and the regional partners to meet 2026 on its own terms. What it needs is to act on a warning while the skies are still, deceptively blue.
