PORT MORESBY — A severe drought linked to a powerful El Niño climate pattern has left millions of people in Papua New Guinea facing shortages of food and clean water, disrupted schools and health clinics, and forced planned power cuts in the capital, according to reporting published on October 29 and 30, 2026. The country’s National Weather Service declared the onset of El Niño in June 2026, but officials quoted in that reporting said much of the country was already experiencing drought by that point. By late October, the crisis had been described by an influential coalition of churches, trade unions and business groups as a national crisis, while the government had already declared a national humanitarian emergency on October 7. Those two descriptions — a government emergency declaration and a civic coalition’s warning of a national crisis — are not the same thing, and the difference between them is central to understanding both the scale of the drought and the argument now under way in Papua New Guinea about how to respond to it.
Any discussion of how many people are affected must start with a warning about the numbers themselves, because several different figures have been reported, and they measure different things at different dates. The National Weather Service’s assistant director, Kasis Inape, was quoted by The Guardian as estimating that about 8 million people had been affected by the time El Niño was declared in June. That is a broad, early estimate of exposure, not a count of people facing the same level of hunger or water shortage at a single moment in late October. A joint communiqué from the 32nd Papua New Guinea-Australia Ministerial Forum, published on October 20, recorded a different figure: more than 5.5 million people assessed as at risk across 20 of the country’s 22 provinces at the time of the October 7 emergency declaration. A national situation report dated October 9, cited by the Minister for Health and National Disaster Services, Dr Billy Joseph, estimated that 1.812 million people were living in drought-critical areas across nine provinces. The minister himself stressed that the last figure did not represent the verified number of people requiring immediate humanitarian assistance, and that further assessments were needed to identify the worst-affected communities. Readers who see the 8 million, 5.5 million and 1.8 million figures side by side should therefore not treat them as competing claims about the same group. They are different measures — affected, at risk, and living in drought-critical areas — taken at different stages of a crisis that has unfolded over months.
That caution does not make the crisis smaller. Even the narrowest of the three figures, 1.812 million people in drought-critical areas, represents a very large share of a country whose population is roughly 10 to 11 million, and the broader figures suggest that a majority of the population has felt some effect of the drought, whether through failed gardens, dried water sources, power cuts or disrupted services. The reporting reviewed for this article consistently describes the same pattern across provinces: rivers and creeks drying up, family food gardens withering, and households walking farther to collect water. In a country where most people are subsistence farmers who depend directly on rainfall, those three effects together amount to a threat to daily survival, not merely an inconvenience. When a garden fails, a family loses both food and income. When a river dries, it loses drinking water, washing water and, in many remote areas, a transport route. When both happen at once, the options for coping narrow quickly.
How El Niño starved one of the wettest countries of rain
Papua New Guinea is normally one of the wettest places on Earth, which makes the current drought harder for outsiders to grasp. The country’s heavy rainfall comes from moisture carried by warm tropical waters in the Pacific, and its wet season normally runs from November to April. El Niño disrupts that system. It occurs when surface waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific become unusually warm, shifting atmospheric circulation and rainfall patterns around the world. In Papua New Guinea’s case in 2026, the eastward shift of warm waters deprived the country of the rainfall on which its subsistence farmers depend, a shift described by Inape as leaving the country starved of rain. Some areas received less than a quarter of their usual rainfall since August, according to reporting based on National Weather Service data. That figure, like the population figures, is an average for the worst-affected areas, not a uniform national total, but it explains why rivers that normally run year-round have dried and why gardens planted in expectation of rain have failed.
Forecasts cited in reporting on the crisis suggest that the current El Niño could become the strongest on record, with its effects intensified by global warming, and Indonesia’s weather agency has warned that strong El Niño conditions could persist into the first quarter of 2027. Those forecasts should be treated as forecasts, not as certainties, and they refer to the climate pattern across the Pacific as a whole, not to rainfall in any single Papua New Guinean village. A regional outlook cited in recent coverage forecast below-normal rainfall across much of Papua New Guinea for November to January, while noting that local conditions can differ. That nuance matters for the months ahead. The wet season, which normally brings relief from November, may be shorter than usual if El Niño persists, as Inape warned, but short-term relief in some areas is still possible. The danger is not that no rain will fall anywhere, but that rain will be too little, too late or too unevenly spread to restore gardens and water sources before households exhaust their coping strategies.
The drought has also been compounded, in the Highlands, by frost. Reporting from the national broadcaster, NBC PNG, described devastating impacts from the Highlands to coastal provinces, with months of little to no rain drying up natural water sources in Simbu province and food gardens failing under a combination of dryness and excessive heat. In high-altitude areas, frost can destroy crops already weakened by drought, including sweet potatoes, taro and bananas, the staple foods on which many families depend. The combination is particularly cruel: heat and dryness at lower altitudes, frost at higher altitudes, and in both cases the same result — a garden that produces far less than a family needs. NBC PNG quoted a health worker in Chuave, in Simbu, as reporting increases in flu, cough, diarrhoea and skin diseases as people were forced to drink from dirty water sources. That link, between water scarcity and disease, is one of the most predictable consequences of a drought, and one of the reasons health officials treat water access as a medical emergency as well as a humanitarian one.
Gardens failing, water walks lengthening, clinics cutting hours
The human detail in the reporting gives the statistics a shape that numbers alone cannot convey. In Morobe province, on the country’s northeastern coast, smaller rivers in Bulolo district have dried up, leaving families without water for drinking, cooking and washing. A resident of Leklu village was quoted as saying that all the rivers near her home had dried up, including the one behind her house, and that she and her children now had to walk for miles every afternoon to fetch water from the other side. That walk, repeated daily, takes time away from gardening, schooling, paid work and rest, and it falls disproportionately on women and girls, who in many communities carry the main responsibility for collecting water. CARE International’s humanitarian projects manager in Papua New Guinea, Emilly Meren, was quoted as saying that families in rural highland areas were rationing food to one meal a day, and that food insecurity was leading to localised disputes between families. The same reporting noted that women and girls were bearing the brunt of the crisis, a pattern seen in droughts worldwide, where the work of finding water and stretching food falls most heavily on those already carrying the largest share of household labour.
Schools and health facilities have also been affected, in ways that show how a drought reaches beyond farms and kitchens. Some schools and health centres in Morobe were reported to have reduced their opening hours to half a day, while some clinics stopped admitting patients for overnight stays because of water shortages. A school that closes early, or a clinic that cannot keep a patient overnight, is not merely an inconvenience. It means children miss lessons, patients miss treatment, and communities lose the two institutions they most rely on when illness spreads. In Simbu, provincial disaster officials warned that if the dry spell continued, the situation could worsen into a major food and water crisis similar to the 2015 El Niño, a comparison that carries weight in a country where many adults remember that earlier drought and its effects on gardens, water and health. Provincial disaster offices across the Highlands were urged to conduct rapid assessments and provide immediate relief, a sign that local authorities, not only the national government, were being asked to respond quickly with limited resources.
In Southern Highlands province alone, approximately 300,000 people were reported to lack reliable access to safe drinking water, according to coverage of the crisis in late October. That single-province figure helps to explain why national totals, however they are counted, translate into local emergencies. A province of that size, without reliable drinking water, needs tankers, purification, storage and distribution, none of which can be improvised quickly in mountainous terrain with limited roads. The same logistical difficulty applies to food relief. Papua New Guinea’s terrain, limited transport infrastructure and dependence on local food production mean that a prolonged dry spell can turn into a threat to entire communities faster than in countries where food can be trucked in easily from a neighbouring region. That vulnerability is not a criticism of the people affected. It is a description of the geography and infrastructure in which they live, and it is why humanitarian agencies emphasise early assessment and pre-positioning of supplies, rather than waiting until gardens have failed completely.
Power cuts reach the capital
One of the most striking features of the 2026 drought is that it has reached Port Moresby, the capital, through the electricity system. Falling dam levels reduced hydropower generation, and the state-owned electricity provider, PNG Power, introduced planned power cuts. The company warned that electricity disruptions could continue for as long as 10 months, while it regulated water releases from dams to preserve the city’s water supply. That trade-off — between generating electricity now and preserving water for drinking later — is a stark illustration of how a drought forces choices between essential services. A city that loses power for hours at a time faces disrupted businesses, hospitals running on back-up generation, schools without lighting or cooling, and households unable to store food safely. A city that drains its dams to keep the lights on risks running out of drinking water altogether. Neither option is acceptable for long, which is why the 10-month warning, even if it proves pessimistic, has focused attention on the need for alternative water and power planning.
The power cuts also matter because they show that the drought is not only a rural crisis. Urban residents, who do not depend directly on food gardens, are affected through services they normally take for granted. That urban impact may, paradoxically, help to explain why the crisis has received more national attention in late October than it did in its early months, when its worst effects were concentrated in remote highland and coastal communities. Peter Aitsi, co-chair of the Community Coalition Against Corruption, was quoted as urging the government to carry out proper assessments of the unfolding impacts, particularly in rural areas, and as noting that urban centres had been mostly shielded in the early stages. His point, as reported, was not that urban suffering matters more, but that rural suffering had been under-assessed and under-reported, and that a national response must be based on proper data from the places hardest hit, not only on what is visible in the capital.
Government response, funding, and the argument over a state of emergency
The government’s formal response began with the October 7 declaration of a national humanitarian emergency, after the National Weather Service confirmed a strong El Niño. Prime Minister James Marape instructed provincial and district authorities to prepare for a prolonged dry season, and the government has explored funding options for disaster relief. The funding figures reported in late October are large, but they too require careful reading, because different reports cite different allocations at different dates. On October 19, Marape was reported as saying that 2.5 million kina had been allocated to each province, with an initial 2.5 million kina provided towards a planned 5 million kina per district. A day later, the joint communiqué with Australia said that 10 million kina per province and 5 million kina per district had been released under National Executive Council Decision 154 of 2026, with a finance instruction issued to govern the accounting of relief funds. Separately, Dr Joseph told Parliament that the government had approved 1.165 billion kina through a supplementary budget, comprising 665 million kina in reallocated funding and 500 million kina in new funding, to strengthen the national drought response.
Those figures are not necessarily contradictory. They may reflect different stages of approval, different pots of money, or the difference between an initial allocation and a later, larger release. But the fact that they differ, and that they were reported within days of each other, illustrates a wider problem in the response: the difficulty of tracking, from outside government, exactly how much money has reached which province, and how quickly. Dr Joseph addressed that concern directly in Parliament, according to reporting of his statement, by framing his remarks around three central issues raised by members: governance and coordination, access to public funds, and priorities for drought relief assistance. He also addressed calls for a national state of emergency, saying the government recognised the seriousness of the drought but maintained that such a declaration required careful consideration of its constitutional and legal implications, and would only be considered if existing disaster management laws and arrangements proved inadequate and additional emergency powers became necessary. That position is a policy judgement, not a denial of the crisis, and it should be reported as such. Critics, including the coalition that described the situation as a national crisis, have argued that there appears to be no coordinated plan to protect vulnerable communities. The government, in its public statements, has pointed to the emergency declaration, the supplementary budget and the provincial and district allocations as evidence of a coordinated response. The truth, as with the population figures, will become clearer as assessments are completed and as spending is audited, rather than from competing press statements alone.
International partners have also been involved, though the reporting reviewed for this article does not describe a large-scale international relief operation on the scale seen in some other Pacific disasters. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has been working with Papua New Guinea’s authorities on drought preparedness and agricultural resilience, and government officials and humanitarian partners reviewed a national agricultural drought action plan covering 2026 and 2027 in August. A new agricultural drought action platform, developed with the National Weather Service, is intended to provide monitoring and early warning information across all 22 provinces. Australia, Papua New Guinea’s closest neighbour and largest aid partner, discussed the drought at the ministerial forum that produced the October 20 communiqué. Those institutional steps — plans, platforms, forums — may sound bureaucratic, but in a slow-onset disaster like a drought, they are often the difference between a response that reaches the right villages in time and one that arrives after gardens have already failed. Their value will be judged, in the end, by whether water, food and health support reach the communities described in the reporting: the family in Leklu walking miles for water, the clinic in Morobe cutting overnight admissions, and the highland household rationing itself to one meal a day.
What happens next, and what to watch
The next few months will be decisive, and they will be shaped as much by weather as by policy. If the wet season arrives on time and brings sustained rain from November, gardens may recover partially, rivers may refill, and dam levels may rise enough to ease power cuts. If El Niño shortens the wet season, as Inape warned it might, or if rainfall remains below normal through January, as the regional outlook cited in recent coverage suggests, the crisis could deepen even as the calendar turns to the season normally associated with relief. That uncertainty is why officials and aid workers alike emphasise assessment over assumption. A village that received rain in November may still face a food gap in February if its gardens were planted late or its seed stocks were exhausted. A dam that refills partially may still require rationing if the dry season returns early. The crisis, in other words, will not end on a single rainy day, and readers should be sceptical of any claim that it has ended simply because rain has fallen somewhere in the country.
Three things are worth watching in particular. First, the results of the rapid assessments urged by provincial disaster offices, and whether they confirm, revise or replace the October 9 estimate of 1.812 million people in drought-critical areas. Better data will not by itself feed anyone, but it will determine where food, water and health support are sent first. Second, the pace and transparency of the funding already announced: whether the provincial and district allocations described in October reach local authorities in full, and whether the supplementary budget is spent on water, food and health priorities rather than absorbed by administration. Third, the condition of essential services: whether schools and clinics in Morobe and elsewhere return to full hours, whether PNG Power’s planned cuts shorten or lengthen, and whether disease reports from places like Chuave stabilise or rise as water sources remain strained. Those are concrete, checkable indicators, and they will tell a clearer story about the drought’s trajectory than any single national total.
For the wider Pacific, the Papua New Guinea drought is also a warning about how El Niño interacts with existing vulnerability. The country is not short of water in normal years, and it is not short of farming knowledge. Its vulnerability comes from dependence on rainfall, from terrain that makes relief difficult, and from infrastructure that links water, food, health, education and power so tightly that a failure in one system quickly affects the others. That interdependence is why a drought that began as a rainfall deficit has become, by late October, a crisis touching gardens, rivers, clinics, schools and the capital’s power grid at the same time. It is also why the response cannot be measured by a single announcement, a single funding figure or a single population estimate. It will be measured, village by village and month by month, by whether water returns to taps and rivers, whether gardens produce again, and whether the families now walking miles for water and rationing food to one meal a day can return to something closer to normal life.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from NBC PNG, The PNG Bulletin and AnewZ.