El Niño events have caused crop failures in parts of Europe and raised grain prices in other countries.
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The El Niño weather phenomenon, which today affects the climate and economy of regions bordering the Pacific Ocean, also caused famine 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 precipitation patterns around the world. When waters cool in the same area of the Pacific Ocean, it is called La Niña, and this fluctuation between the warm and cold phases of the ocean is known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
The phenomenon is having a major impact on tropical and subtropical regions – particularly in Australasia, where it is causing drier weather and often leading to droughts and wildfires, and in the Americas, where rainfall is increasing, sometimes catastrophically.
But until now, little scientific attention has been paid to its influence on Europe. Emil Esmaili at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues.
Esmaili's team looked at a dataset of 160 famines in early modern Europe, as well as El Niño and La Niña data based on tree-ring data.
They found that more than 40 percent of famines in Central Europe during this period were associated with El Niño events.
El Niño tends to increase rainfall in the region, which could lead to excessive soil moisture and crop failure, the researchers said.
While El Niño events did not directly lead to famine in other parts of the continent, they increased the annual likelihood that famine will persist by 24 percent in all nine European regions the researchers studied.
To explain why, Esmaili and his colleagues also looked at grain and fish prices and found that El Niño events raised the prices of various food items across Europe for several years.
David Ubilava at the University of Sydney in Australia say ENSO may still be causing food insecurity and malnutrition today among low-income households in regions such as South and Southeast Asia, Oceania and parts of Africa.
But while El Niño events still affect Europe's climate, they are unlikely to have such a major impact on food security, he says.
“The same weather effect today would have a very different outcome. Crops are more resilient, production methods are much, much better, weather forecasts have gone from virtually non-existent to fairly accurate, and markets are integrated,” Ubilava says.
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