Who Pays the Price? El Nino, Food, and Climate Justice in the Classroom

Right now, as you read this, a significant El Nino weather pattern is building across the Pacific. By the end of 2026, it is expected to have disrupted harvests across South and Southeast Asia, East Africa, and Central America. Rice, palm oil, coffee, and sugar are among the crops most exposed. The price of those goods will rise in supermarkets across Europe and North America. Most of us will grumble about the cost of coffee but most of us will pay it. This post explores how we can use El Nino as teachable moment in the classroom.

Exploring that gap between those who caused climate change and those who are most harmed by it, between those who can absorb the cost and those who cannot – is what climate justice means. And El Nino, which is happening right now and is in the news, is one of the clearest and most teachable illustrations of it and we can use it in the classroom.

What is El Nino and how can we use it in the classroom?

El Nino is a naturally occurring climate pattern. It’s a warming of surface water in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that happens every two to seven years. It changes weather patterns across the globe. Some places get wetter. Others get much drier. Neither is neutral for the people who live there.

Crucially, El Nino is not caused by climate change. It is a natural cycle that has happened for thousands of years. But climate change is making its effects more intense – and arriving on top of weather systems that are already under stress, in food systems that are already stretched.

The 2026 El Nino is expected to be significant. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has already flagged high risk of heat and drought stress across southern Africa, the Sahel, and parts of Southeast Asia. Fishing restrictions off Peru have driven fishmeal prices up by more than 75% in a year. Rice, sugar, and palm oil – staple foods for billions of people – are all under pressure.

The numbers

The World Bank estimates that a single strong El Nino event can cost the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars, with agriculture bearing a large share of the losses.

Analysts have put possible price shocks at 10% to 50% across core commodities in 2026, with the most exposed crops, including rice, palm oil, sugar, and coffee, potentially rising 50% to 100% or more.

Source: Risilience / Reuters analysis, June 2026

Who gets hurt – and who does not

This is the climate justice question in the classroom at the heart of El Nino. The answer is not complicated, even if it is uncomfortable and it can be explored in the classroom.

When food prices rise, what happens depends almost entirely on how much of your income you spend on food. In high-income countries like the UK, the average household spends around 8% of its income on food. When coffee goes up 50%, it is noticeable. It is not threatening.

In low-income countries, households routinely spend 40% to 60% of their income on food. A 50% price rise in staple crops is not an inconvenience. It means people eat less. It means children go hungry. In the most extreme cases, it means people die.

But there is a second injustice layered on top of the first. The countries most affected by El Nino are also, overwhelmingly, the countries that contributed least to the greenhouse gas emissions that are making climate patterns more extreme. Sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for less than 4% of cumulative global emissions. Southeast Asia, home to many of the rice and palm oil producing regions now under threat, has historically contributed a fraction of what Europe and North America have emitted per capita.

The people growing the food that the rest of the world eats are paying the price for a crisis they did not cause.

The simple version for the classroom: The countries most affected by climate change are mostly the ones that emitted the least. The countries that emitted the most can mostly afford to adapt. That is not fair. That is climate injustice.

What is climate justice?

Climate justice is the idea that the impacts of climate change, and the costs of responding to it, should be distributed fairly, and that those who caused the problem should bear more of the cost of fixing it.

It connects to ideas pupils already understand: fairness, responsibility, cause and effect. If you make a mess, you clear it up. If a decision affects someone else, they should have a say in it.

Applied to climate change:

High-income countries emitted the majority of the greenhouse gases that are driving climate change. Low-income countries are suffering the consequences disproportionately.
Low-income countries often lack the resources to adapt. They can’t afford to build sea walls, change crops, relocate communities, or develop early warning systems.
The global food system means that climate impacts in one part of the world show up as price rises, shortages, and food insecurity everywhere, but most severely for those with least financial cushion.
A just response to climate change would involve wealthy nations doing more, faster, and supporting lower-income nations to adapt and develop without repeating the high-carbon path.

The just transition is the related idea, that moving to a green economy should be done in a way that is fair to workers and communities, not just announced and left for people to manage alone. We explored this in our post on working class communities and the green transition. The same principle applies internationally.

El Nino into the classroom

El Nino is a gift for climate justice teaching precisely because it is current, specific, and connects the abstract to the concrete. A map of affected regions, a supermarket receipt, and a question, these are enough to start an El Nino conversation in the classroom.

Here are five subject-specific starting points, all using the same core material.

Geography | KS3 / KS4

Map the El Nino impact zones. Pupils mark the regions predicted to experience drought and harvest failure in 2026 e.g. parts of southern Africa, the Sahel, South and Southeast Asia, Central America. Then map where those crops are exported to. Draw the supply chains. Ask: where does the impact land first, and where does it land last?

Discussion questions: Why do some regions feel the effects of El Nino more than others? What is the relationship between where food is grown and where it is eaten? What would happen to food prices in the UK if wheat harvests failed in three major growing regions at once?

Media Studies / English | KS4 / KS5

Compare coverage of the same El Nino event in different publications. A UK supermarket trade press piece on coffee price rises. A news report from an Indonesian farming community on failed palm oil harvests. An NGO briefing on food insecurity in the Sahel. Same weather event, three very different stories. Who is centred in each? Whose experience is treated as normal, and whose as exceptional?

Discussion questions: What choices did each publication make about whose perspective to include? What does the language in each piece assume about the reader? What would the story look like if it were written from the perspective of a smallholder farmer in Tanzania?

PSHE / Citizenship | KS3 / KS4

The banana in your lunchbox. Where did it come from? Who grew it, under what conditions, and what do they earn? What happens to that person’s income when a drought hits the growing region? This is a values and empathy exercise as much as a factual one – connecting a familiar object to an unfamiliar life, and asking what responsibility, if any, we have.

Discussion questions: Is it fair that the people who grow our food are the most vulnerable to climate disruption? What could governments do about this? What could individuals do? Is there a difference between what is fair and what actually happens?

Science / Environmental Science | KS4 / KS5

El Nino as a systems problem. Start with the ENSO mechanism – warm Pacific water, shifted rainfall patterns, disrupted weather across multiple continents. Then layer on climate change: how does a warming planet change the baseline conditions that El Nino interacts with? This is systems thinking applied to real-world data, using current Met Office and NOAA data sets that pupils can access directly.

Discussion questions: El Nino is a natural cycle. Climate change is human-caused. How do they interact? If the planet continues to warm, what happens to natural climate cycles like ENSO? What does that mean for the parts of the world most exposed to El Nino effects?

Economics / Business Studies | KS4 / KS5

Commodity prices and food security. Use real commodity price data, so rice, coffee, palm oil, sugar, and trace what happens to prices during El Nino years. Then ask: who absorbs those price rises? Model what a 50% price rise in staple foods means for a household spending 8% of income on food versus one spending 50%. The numbers tell the justice story directly.

Discussion questions: Why do food prices rise globally when harvests fail in specific regions? What is the difference between a price rise being inconvenient and being catastrophic? Who decides how commodity markets work, and who has no say in those decisions?

Keeping it simple

Climate justice can feel like a big concept. It does not have to be taught as one. The El Nino hook works in the classroom because it is specific. Something is happening right now. It affects real places and real people. It has a cause and a consequence and a question about fairness. That is enough.

You do not need to teach the whole history of emissions and equity in one lesson. You need one good question and the materials to investigate it. The geography lesson works with a map and a supply chain. The English lesson works with two newspaper articles side by side. The PSHE lesson works with a banana and fifteen minutes of honest conversation.

A note on being honest and realistic

Climate justice raises questions that do not have easy answers. Who is responsible? What should wealthy nations do? Is individual action enough? These are genuinely contested political questions, and you do not need to resolve them in the classroom.

What you do need to do is ask them honestly, present the evidence clearly, and let pupils form their own views. The facts of El Nino, food prices, and who bears the cost are not contested. The political questions about what to do about it are.

That distinction – between the scientific and economic facts, and the political choices about how to respond – is one of the most important things climate education can teach. Teach the facts clearly. Hold the political questions open. Trust your pupils with the complexity.

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