El Niño 2015 Conference Report

In November 2015, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University, in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, convened the El Niño 2015 Conference. The report from this conference is now available. In addition to recordings and summaries of the talks and panels, the digital version of the report features participant interviews, social media interactions and conference feedback. Other supplementary material from the conference can be found on our El Nino 2015 web page.

About the Conference: Since early 2015, experts have monitored the development of one of the largest El Niño events of the last 50 years, and notably, the largest since the 1997-98 El Niño that shocked global food, water, health, energy and disaster-response systems and erased years of development gains. The El Niño 2015 Conference brought together physical scientists, social scientists, forecasters, development professionals and journalists from governments, academia, humanitarian agencies and the private sector to share perspectives on the transformation of climate forecasts to climate services in the past two decades. The two-day gathering provided a platform for strategic dialogue to evaluate the big picture and ask questions related to El Niño, extreme events and variability on multiple time scales, including long-term climate change.