Two Countries, One Climate Emergency: How the Same Phenomenon Plays Out Differently in Turkey and Britain

El Niño does not arrive uniformly. Its effects are mediated by geography, existing weather systems, infrastructure, and policy preparedness. Turkey and the United Kingdom are both affected — but in different ways, through different mechanisms, and with different degrees of institutional readiness. This analysis maps the differences and finds the shared vulnerabilities.

By TurkishBritish Magazine  |  Summer 2026

There is a tendency, in coverage of climate phenomena, to treat them as global in a flattening sense: the same emergency, arriving everywhere at the same time, in the same form. The reality is more complex and, in some respects, more troubling. El Niño’s effects are profoundly regional. The same ocean warming that brings drought to Australia brings floods to Peru; the same disruption to atmospheric circulation that desiccates East Africa intensifies rainfall in parts of the Middle East.

For Turkey and the United Kingdom — the two countries at the centre of this magazine’s audience — the 2026 El Niño event will arrive through different pathways, produce different immediate effects, and test different institutional capacities. Understanding those differences is not an academic exercise. It is a guide to where the vulnerabilities lie, and where preparation can make the difference between a difficult summer and a catastrophic one.

Turkey: Direct Exposure, Multiple Vectors

Turkey’s climate exposure to El Niño is indirect but significant. El Niño does not directly drive Turkish weather — the country is geographically distant from the Pacific and its primary climate drivers are the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the North Atlantic Oscillation. But El Niño can reach Turkey through a chain of teleconnections: changes in Pacific sea surface temperatures alter global atmospheric circulation patterns, which in turn affect the pressure systems that govern Turkish weather.

Istanbul University’s Professor Cem Gazioğlu, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Management, has described the simultaneous development of the North Atlantic Oscillation and El Niño as creating a “strong teleconnection mechanism capable of influencing” Turkish climate. His specific warnings focus on marine systems: sea surface temperatures along the Mediterranean, Aegean and Marmara coasts are expected to rise significantly above long-term averages, with risks of oxygen depletion, algal blooms, and mucilage formation in the Sea of Marmara — a phenomenon that has already caused major disruption to Istanbul’s coastal waters in recent years.

Prof. Sermin Tağil of Izmir Bakirchy University has set out an explicit regional geography of risk. The Aegean, Mediterranean and south-eastern Anatolia regions face elevated drought risk through the summer and autumn. The Black Sea region faces elevated flood risk, particularly from short-duration but high-intensity rainfall events — precisely the pattern that devastated the region in summer 2021, when catastrophic flooding killed hundreds of people and destroyed thousands of homes.

Tağil’s assessment of the timeline is striking: the effects of the super El Niño are expected to extend through 2027. Autumn 2026 and all of 2027 are expected to be warmer than normal, with more frequent extreme weather. New temperature records are anticipated in the summer of 2026 and throughout 2027.

The Sectors Most at Risk in Turkey

United Kingdom: Indirect Effects, Lagged Risks

The United Kingdom’s relationship with El Niño is more attenuated than Turkey’s. The British climate is dominated by the Atlantic and by the position of the jet stream, and El Niño’s teleconnections to the North Atlantic are complex and variable. The Met Office has consistently been cautious about making specific seasonal predictions for the UK on the basis of ENSO state, and that caution is scientifically justified.

What the Met Office has stated is that “El Niño years are one factor that can increase the risk of colder winters in the UK.” This is a narrower and more specific claim than many public accounts suggest. The summer effects in Britain are more ambiguous; the winter effects tend to be clearer, with a historical pattern of increased cold snap risk in the northern hemisphere winter following an El Niño peak.

What is less ambiguous is the background warming that makes each new weather event more extreme than it would have been in a cooler world. The June 2026 heatwave that killed 5,000 people in Germany affected the UK too, albeit with lower mortality. The UK building stock problem — housing designed for cold weather, without adequate ventilation, with south-facing glazing that captures heat — is structural. The National Heat Action Plan exists; its limitations are well documented.

Beyond infrastructure, the UK faces specific risks from ocean warming around its coasts. The AMOC monitoring situation described in Article 2 represents a genuine gap in observational capacity. The UK Natural Environmental Research Council’s funding for the RAPID monitoring array has been described as “at risk from 2027” — precisely the moment when a super El Niño year is likely to make understanding Atlantic circulation most important.

The Shared Vulnerability: What Connects Both Countries

Beyond the specific regional differences, Turkey and Britain share a set of structural vulnerabilities that El Niño will test in both.

The first is agricultural exposure. Turkey is a major food producer, and drought-related crop failures have immediate domestic and regional food security implications. The UK is a significant importer of food from regions that will be more severely affected by El Niño — including parts of South America, Africa and South Asia — and domestic production of wheat, barley and other arable crops is sensitive to summer drought and winter flooding.

The second is energy. Both countries are in the middle of ambitious energy transitions that depend heavily on weather: Turkey is expanding solar and wind capacity; the UK is the world’s largest offshore wind market. El Niño can reduce solar irradiance in cloud-covered regions, alter wind patterns, and increase electricity demand for cooling. Neither country’s energy system has been fully stress-tested against an extended period of climate disruption.

The third is public health infrastructure. The European heatwave death toll — already substantial in June 2026 — will continue to rise through the autumn, particularly if the El Niño peak produces the conditions forecast for late 2026 and into 2027. Both the Turkish and British healthcare systems are under sustained demand pressure. A summer of elevated heat mortality is a stress they will manage rather than absorb.

The fourth, and perhaps most significant, is political. Both countries are, in 2026, in the middle of political transitions: Turkey hosting COP31 and using the climate summit as a vehicle for international repositioning; Britain installing a new prime minister with ambitious climate commitments but a constrained fiscal position. The capacity of both governments to respond to the acute pressures of a super El Niño year while sustaining long-term climate policy ambition will be one of the defining tests of the next eighteen months.