Maybe your cat loves you. Maybe it would kill you if it could.
I have absolutely no idea what makes Vincenzo a good cat. It’s a fact I keep to myself when I meet his owner, Donna Dzurishin, at the Garden State Cat Expo in New Jersey in mid-July. At one of the biggest cat shows in the country, my ignorance puts me in the minority. Plus, Donna’s got that warm kind of energy that almost compels you to hug her — it’s not clear if you need it, she needs it, or maybe you both do. You definitely can’t hug Vincenzo or any of the cats competing. The first rule of the cat show is that you don’t touch the cats (unless you ask first, and, as I come to learn, are prepared to be turned down).
Vincenzo is a solid black Persian — a black cat dusted in gray, with a long fluffy tail and round copper eyes that are hard to make out amid all the fur. People sometimes tell Donna, who has long black hair, that they look alike. Her daughter makes fun of her for it. Vincenzo is an “absolutely beautiful boy,” per Donna, and her first show cat — they’ve only been competing since February. There’s been a learning curve in navigating the show circuit, not to mention Vincenzo’s high-maintenance grooming routine, which rivals that of a Kardashian. “I’m obsessive-compulsive, so I put everything into it,” Donna says.
The idea that someone — let alone hundreds of people — would put their cat into a contest is foreign to me. I cannot fathom caring about ranking cats or undertaking the apparent effort being put in here. Why one cat might be “better” than the next is a mystery.
Donna describes what it is that makes Vincenzo special — his stocky body, his short legs, his nice round head. “Did you see him?” she asks. I don’t want to admit that the visual isn’t helping much in terms of my personal comprehension. Our conversation is cut short because the pair have been called to the ring. Donna pulls a nonplussed Vincenzo from his tent, fluffs him up as best she can, and hurries off. I wish her luck but then decide to follow — in the ring she’s headed to, Vincenzo is in the running for best cat, and I may as well see what happens.
As we walk over, Donna’s friend pulls me aside. She tells me Donna’s husband passed away recently, and cat shows have given her new life. The stakes suddenly feel high.
I am not a cat person. Whenever friends ask why I don’t have one — after all, I am a single woman in her 30s — my response is always the same: There’s too big a risk your cat hates you. Cat owners’ stories are basically, “Oh my God, you won’t believe what Fluffy just did! So cute!” And then they tell you about something objectively destructive and, occasionally, gross. Even if your cat likes you, it’s sometimes distant and perhaps kind of an asshole — most cats are. It’s not a bad thing, really. (See: Grumpy Cat, a cultural icon.) They’re semi-wild animals we have as pets, which is a whole separate complicated issue on its own. The main expectation you can have of a cat is that you can’t have a lot of expectations.
Cats are the ones that got themselves into this situation in the first place, historically speaking. They’ve been living with humans for 4,000 years, dating back to the ancient Egyptians, who deeply admired them, and probably even earlier. (In the Middle Ages, they were associated with witches and devilry, so ancient times were probably a much better era to be a cat.)
Unlike other pets, cats are self-domesticated, because humans — and their crops and grains and food — attract rodents. Cats figured out that where there are people, there are rats and mice, so they started hanging around. They came to America as furry little colonists, on ships.
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Today, cats — along with dogs — are the most popular pets in the world. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, there are some 58 million pet cats in the United States, and a quarter of American households have at least one cat. They have cemented themselves as our begrudging companions, here for the snacks and the safety.
“The whole question of cats is less about the cat and more about the human. A cat is going to be a cat, and they’re very funny and affectionate,” says Ella Cerón, an author, friend, and owner of two black cats — Holly and Olive — when I tell her via text that I’m working on this story. “You as a person also have to understand that there are things in this life you cannot control, and one of those things is a cat.”
What even makes a “good” cat? Do we want them to be loving? Aloof? Friendly? Beautiful? Strong? Or is the idea mainly for them to catch critters? Are they supposed to bend to our will, or are we supposed to bend to theirs?
I decided to go to a cat show to find out. A show cat is different from a pet cat, but as Mark Hannon, former president of the Cat Fanciers’ Association, tells me, “A good pet cat doesn’t necessarily make a show cat, but a show cat should also be a good pet cat.” So, I figure it’s a start.
I know what you might be thinking here. A cat show?? Everybody at the cat show knows you’re thinking that, too. They’ve all had to tell their friends and coworkers that their Saturday plan is to take their cat to a beauty pageant; they’ve gotten the looks. But cat shows are, indeed, a thing.
The first recorded cat show took place in 1871 in England, and cat shows landed in the United States not much later. The Cat Fanciers’ Association (CFA), a nonprofit that licenses shows and governs their rules, was founded in 1906; its mission is “to preserve and promote the pedigreed breeds of cats and to enhance the well-being of all cats.” It currently recognizes 46 breeds. Its rival, the International Cat Association (TICA), recognizes 73. There’s not even agreement about what type of cat counts.
What makes a good cat, show-wise, is quite cut and dried, at least in theory. Cats are intended to adhere to what everyone refers to as “the standard,” meaning an ideal version of the breed, as rated by a judge. Cat shows are a way to proofread cats. Breed councils set the standards and can change them by vote, including whether to allow for different colors or change requirements from “medium to large” to “large to medium.” This seems astonishingly mundane; I’m told the debate can be very heated.
The current CFA standards are outlined in a booklet that spans 132 pages. To insiders, it’s the cat bible. To outsiders, it’s a goofy, arbitrary document. Both the Birman and the Cornish Rex get points for having a “Roman nose.” For RagaMuffins and Ragdolls, that’s penalized. The only cat where temperament is listed as a criterion is the Siberian: It’s supposed to be “unchallenging.” The Chartreux is supposed to have a smile.
The cat show world is both big and small. If you wanted to hit up a show every weekend, you could, though you might have to travel far for it — there are shows all over the country and the globe. Yet, it’s a contained community. Competitors see the same people over and over; they get to know one another and make friends. They see the same judges, too, and if certain judges don’t like your cat, you’re in a pickle until you get a better cat. “Oh, everybody gets mad if you think your cat deserved to be up there and it’s not up there,” Hannon, the former CFA president, says.
To judge a cat is to love a cat. When judges evaluate a cat, they hold them, caress them, whisper to them, coo at them, even kiss them. Becoming a cat judge takes years, with all the studying, training, and testing, and it’s not for the cash. Show organizers generally cover judges’ flights, hotels, and meals. Otherwise, judges make a dollar and a quarter per cat.
“We do it because we enjoy handling these cats,” says Nancy Dodds, a cat judge who flew in from Arizona for the weekend. “They’re like artwork.”
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Dodds puts on a bit of a show when she judges. She plays along when one of the cats gets frisky and sinks its claws into her table pole, refusing to let go. She spins one lackadaisical cat around on the table as it lies down and jokes about the heft of another, remarking, “I tell people I lift weights every weekend.”
The vibe of a cat show can only be described as semi-managed chaos — I guess the phrase “like herding cats” exists for a reason. A muffled voice over a loudspeaker calls out for cats to report to their assigned ring, each with its own judge (there are multiple categories and multiple “best cats” per day). Their owners deposit them into numbered cages behind the judge and wait for them to be pulled out and appraised.
There is no prize for best cat, just glory. Rankings are supposed to be objective and based on a points scale. “I don’t like to say we take points off, I like to say we put them all together, and the total is bigger than the sum of the parts because you can put all those parts together, and each point is worth something, and then you can have an ugly cat,” Dodds says. It sounds to me like dating: Someone can check all the boxes and still not be the right fit.
Judges really shouldn’t take into account a cat’s demeanor, but they’re only human, so it’s an inevitable consideration. Most people I speak to say that the highest-performing cats are the ones that (allegedly) want to be there. Peter Vanwonterghem, a judge who had flown in from Belgium, tells me, “You really see which cats feel comfortable on the table and which make an issue.”
Not all cat conduct is tolerated. Another rule of the cat show is no biting allowed. Three strikes and you’re out, banned for life.
Luckily for Donna, Vincenzo is not a biter, and he comes from a long line of good cats. The breeder Donna bought him from took a chance on her — you don’t hand out a show-quality cat to just anyone, let alone to someone who’s never shown before.
At its core, this isn’t really about winning. Donna’s husband died in February 2020 after a battle with cancer, and the loss left her deeply depressed. Vincenzo has been a blessing. Beyond competing in the shows, she’s made two close friends through her cats and cat show hobby, including the woman she considers her mentor. They met on Facebook when Donna posted a photo of her other Persian cat, Cupcake, on a page and asked for help with grooming — even a non-show Persian requires upkeep. “When I tell you I had her a mess, I had her a mess,” she says when we catch up on the phone a couple of months post-show.
While this has been a life-changer for Donna, she’s aware of how ridiculous it can sound. “I call him my son. People laugh at me. I say I love him like I gave birth to him myself,” she says.
She puts time into caring for Vincenzo every day, and on big days, the bathing and blow drying and brushing can take several hours. “It’s more baths than I take,” she quips of his bathing routine. There’s the sculpting of the face, which she’s just learning to do, including making sure his smile is right and, believe it or not, tending to his … eyebrows? … though she’s not sure that’s the correct terminology. Donna has spent thousands of dollars on Vincenzo, between the products and accessories and his multiple blow dryers. “To get the perfect show cat, they’re not inexpensive, I’ll tell you that,” Donna says.
Vincenzo is indeed a fancy cat. Donna’s other cats, of which there are three, not so much.
She bought Cupcake as a therapy cat for her grandson during her husband’s illness. She isn’t show quality (there’s something wrong with her eyes). Then, her daughter wanted an Exotic Shorthair, so they got Lila, who failed out of a breeding program in Russia. (All three generations of Donna’s family live in the same house.) Lila is adorable, but she’s got a lot of issues — she has anxiety and a heart murmur. “Probably the best thing that happened to her is that she got here with us,” Donna says. Giovanni, also an Exotic Shorthair, was next, at Donna’s grandson’s Christmas request. He’s registered with the CFA, but he’s too skinny to show. Vincenzo is the last arrival, coming in December 2022. “I said to my family, ‘I’m doing something for myself,’” Donna says.
She loves them all, but Vincenzo is her favorite.
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Shows take a narrow view of what a cat should be — the whole shebang is pretty much looks. But what about cats as pets or just as living beings with which we coexist? How would one even begin to set real-world standards for a cat? What do we get out of our relationships with them?
Many people consider their cats to be members of their families, their kids. They often say their pets help them with stress and loneliness, though problems and anxieties can arise with pets, too.
Jessica Austin, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the dynamic between people and cats, explains that cat owners like having a relationship with a being that is fairly independent and content to be on its own. “They see the cats as having their own interests, having their own needs, having their own desires, and that’s fine,” she says. “If you are a person who needs validation from your pet, maybe a cat is not the best pet for you.”
Cats provide a quiet kind of companionship. Austin quoted one of her research subjects — a cat dad — on their unique appeal: “It’s somebody who is content being alone together.”
Societally, cats can be misunderstood. You often hear people say they are uncomfortable around cats or that they flat-out don’t like them. That’s for a multitude of reasons, experts say — they’re wilder, they’re more skeptical and standoffish. And, to put it plainly, they are not dogs.
“It’s basically what I call looking at cats through dog-colored glasses, so in that respect, cats are failed dogs, you know? We hold up this ideal,” says Jackson Galaxy, a cat whisperer, television host, and YouTuber, in an interview.
We’ve got a sense of what makes a good dog. It’s a loyal companion. It loves you unconditionally. Maybe it has a job, like hunting, herding, or being a cop. Even if it doesn’t, it probably knows a trick or two. With cats, it’s fuzzier.
Cats aren’t here to serve us; the relationship is more of a push and pull. They require boundaries. They are an exercise in consent.
“They’re still primarily predatory, they’re also a prey animal,” says Mikel Delgado, a scientist and cat expert. They have a need for safety and comfort in new environments, and we often don’t recognize that. “We are looking at our companion animals through a very human lens, and we don’t really think about how they experience the world.”
When a cat is dissatisfied, owners will know it, and its surroundings are often at fault. If you’ve got a “bad” cat, the bad is on you — your cat is scratching the couch because it doesn’t have anywhere else to scratch. Cats are not as eager to make people happy in the way dogs are, nor are they as motivated by food. People can only give them so many treats before they’re over it. “We are responsible for their emotional well-being, but they’re not responsible for ours,” Delgado says.
Back at the Garden State cat show, I have abandoned all journalistic integrity and am firmly Team Vincenzo. I’ve followed him and Donna to the ring where they’re naming best cat.
There are 10 finalists in cages behind the judge. She pulls each out in descending order, Miss America style, talks about their attributes, and compliments them before she returns them and places a ribbon on their holding spot.
Tenth best cat is named, then ninth, then eighth, and so on, and Vincenzo still hasn’t been called. The tension builds. With two cats left, the judge pulls Vincenzo from his cage. Team V breathes out a sigh — second isn’t bad. But then, when the judge puts him back, she doesn’t hand out a ribbon to indicate his placing. Vincenzo is still in the running! She then takes out the other cat, a white Persian, his competition.
It’s Vincenzo, the black poof, versus his unnamed opponent, the white poof. The judge says that both are, in reality, the best cat and asks the audience to clap for their favorite. It sounds like Vincenzo gets less applause, but it’s hard to tell. Whatever the case, Vincenzo wins. He is named best cat. Donna cries. Her friend cries. If I’m being honest here, I almost cry a little bit, too.
“I’m ecstatic. I was very nervous. This is a hard competition here,” a still-emotional Donna tells me in what amounts to a post-game interview. Vincenzo has won best cat before, but not at a show as big as this one.
The stakes in life don’t always have to be high for them to feel like it. Joy comes from truly unexpected places. And if it’s a cat — because it’s your reluctant pet, your show animal, or whatever else — so be it.
Jeffrey Wright gives a career-crowning performance in this wry and surprisingly warm-hearted race satire.
Early on in American Fiction, a deceptively biting and warmly funny new satire, a writer (played by Jeffrey Wright in a career-crowning performance) sneaks into a book fair event celebrating the hot new book of the season. His eyebrows arch at the title: We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.
Wright’s character, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, is a biased observer. His last few books have flopped, hard, and he’s having trouble selling his most recent novel to anyone. His erudite, classically inflected books are unfashionable in an industry craving the next American Dirt, minus the scandal.
Monk, who grew up in a wealthy family of doctors, says he doesn’t see race. His critics still want him to write “Blacker” books. What, they demand, does his reworking of Aeschylus’s The Persians have to do with the African American experience?
Ready and willing to give the critics what they want is Sinatra Golden (a terrific Issa Rae), a former publishing assistant who tells her audience that she wrote We’s Lives in Da Ghetto because representation matters. Monk thinks Sinatra’s work is craven and phony, playing into the worst stereotypes about Black life. Still, he can’t deny it makes money.
So one night, giggly with whiskey and in need of funds to care for his ailing mother, Monk sits down at his laptop and types out a book full of all the tropes he says he hates and he knows white people love: a story of drugs, deadbeat fathers, and gang shootings, written in tortured AAVE. He titles it My Pafology and submits it to his agent as performance art.
My Pafology sells immediately, of course, for more money than any of Monk’s “real” books did. Which means in order to get access to the money he needs, Monk finds himself in disguise as a debut author and wanted fugitive going by the alias Stagg R. Leigh. Blinking without his owlish professorial glasses, Monk tries his best to deadpan his way through meetings with oily industry types who fall all over themselves to assure him that his book is deeply, deeply important — even when he demands they change the title to Fuck.
American Fiction is based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, written in 2001, which critics read at the time as an extended satire on Sapphire and her mega-bestseller of Black trauma, Push. Now, 22 years later, publishing is still so infatuated with sentimental stories of the hard lives of poor people and queer people and people of color that the only part of Monk’s dark joke that rings false is the AAVE. Today’s trauma narratives are generally written lyrically.
Debut director Cord Jefferson handles the satire of this premise with a feather-light touch. In Jefferson’s hands, it’s clear that Monk has a point when he rails about the blind spots of the publishing industry. It’s also clear that Monk is smug and self-righteous, a bit of a bore. Even his agent rolls his eyes at Monk’s rants.
Despite his grumpy contrarianism, Monk is an intensely lovable character. In part, that’s thanks to Wright’s gleeful, nuanced performance; in part, it’s because Jefferson shows us all of who Monk is.
As the film opens, Monk is returning to his family home in Boston on a forced leave of absence from his West Coast university job. At home, Monk curves his broad shoulders in and lightens the register of his plummy voice. He’s the nerd, the egghead who never made it as a doctor like his siblings did, the contrarian who’s not really sure how to keep in touch with his family and so pretends he doesn’t want to.
Still, when Monk sits down with his siblings (Tracee Ellis Ross, warm and acerbic, and Sterling K. Brown in a live-wire performance), you can see him reaching unsteadily for a half-remembered connection. When he begins to court his neighbor Coraline (the luminous Erika Alexander), he does so with a beautiful hesitancy, as though he’s forgotten the concept of flirting.
What makes Monk feel most human, though, is how willfully he deceives himself. He is blind to his father’s infidelities and his siblings’ personal problems. He pretends My Pafology is nothing but a joke, but it’s in this book, the one he considers to be most disposable and absurd, that he embeds his real feelings of rage and betrayal about his father.
In the film’s strongest scene, Monk confronts Sinatra about We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. He asks her if she isn’t ashamed to have written something so fake and trashy.
Sinatra demurs. She based her book on hours of research, she tells him. Some of the narrative is drawn directly from her interview transcripts. And anyway, she says, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with giving the market what it wants.”
Monk’s smug certainty falters. It’s crucial for his worldview, for the nihilistic joke of My Pafology, for everything that he’s doing, that he’s able to see Sinatra as a hack. If it turns out that she’s just as savvy and intelligent as he is — well, what does he do then?
It’s a predicament that is, like Monk himself, what Coraline calls “funny. Sad funny.” Exactly.
American Fiction will appear in select theaters December 15 and expand December 22.
Dengue, drought, and floods are hammering Peru and Bolivia this year. At the UN climate talks, they’re seeking justice.
This story is part of a Vox series examining how the climate crisis is impacting communities around the world, as the 28th annual United Nations conference on climate change (COP28) unfolds.
For centuries, off the coast of what’s now Peru and Ecuador, fishers noticed that every few years, around Christmas, the sea surface warmed up.
Ordinarily, a chilly swirl of currents would churn up nutrients that feed wildlife near the surface, yielding a bountiful catch. The arrival of warm water slowed the currents, and thus slowed the upwelling of phosphorus and nitrogen from deep in the ocean that normally fed plankton that in turn fed fish. As a result, the fishermen would often return home with empty nets.
Spanish settlers later dubbed this phenomenon “El Niño,” the boy, a reference to the Christmastime birth of Jesus.
Since then, scientists have learned that what fishers observed is actually a powerful mechanism that ripples all the way across the Pacific Ocean and reshapes weather around the world. And as average temperatures have risen thanks to human-caused climate change, they’ve amplified El Niño’s disruption.
This year, the combination of a powerful El Niño and record-high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has warmed the planet to the hottest levels humans have ever measured.
It may also be the first time global average temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above average temperatures before the Industrial Revolution and all the fossil fuel burning that ensued. The 2015 Paris climate agreement set a goal of holding average temperature increases to less than 1.5°C. A single year rising above this line doesn’t mean that the average has shifted yet, but it provides an example of what the world will look like when an extreme year like 2023 becomes typical.
While El Niño is a phenomenon independent of climate change, its increasing ferocity has created a preview of life on the planet as temperatures continue to rise. “The impacts of El Niño look a lot like what the impacts of climate change are going to be,” said Christopher Callahan, an earth science researcher at Stanford University.
Some of El Niño’s most acute consequences are in the places closest to where it was first documented. The Andean region, a towering mountain ridge running down South America’s Pacific coast, forms a microcosm of the planet as a whole, from its beaches to its peaks, its deserts to its rainforests. During El Niño years, countries like Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia — together home to more than 110 million people — suffer from strengthened heat waves, drought, and heavy rains. And this year is already leaving scars.
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Aizar Raldes/AFP via Getty Images
The region has already experienced an unusually warm Southern Hemisphere winter with intense heat waves that left inland lakes near record-low water levels. That’s on top of six decades and counting of glacier retreat in the Andes mountains, threatening the long-term water supply for countries like Peru. The Andean region has also seen heavy rains and deadly floods in 2023. The severe weather has damaged farms and is accelerating a migration from rural to urban areas in several South American countries. Now summer is setting in, and more weather extremes are looming.
The current El Niño is poised to be costly. Peru’s government is expecting to spend more than $1 billion to cope with the extremes this year stemming from the severe weather this year and ongoing climate change impacts — a huge sum for a country with a gross domestic product of $242 billion, nearly a hundred times smaller than that of the US. At the United Nations, Peruvian President Dina Boluarte this year proposed creating a new international pact just to deal with El Niño’s devastation.
Now negotiators from the Andean region are meeting their counterparts from around the world at COP28, the annual United Nations climate summit, held in the United Arab Emirates this year, to hash out the next steps for action on climate change. One of the highest priorities for countries like Peru and Ecuador is to secure more funding to cope with the climate change damage already underway, as well as the greater toll that lies ahead. The United Nations this year estimated that it will cost about $387 billion per year for developing countries to adapt to climate change. It’s a tough ask at a time when many countries, rich and poor, are reeling from their own economic woes.
Yet already the goal of keeping warming below 1.5°C on average is almost out of reach, and global greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. “We’re getting closer and closer to the point where we are not going to meet our targets,” said Shaun Martin, vice president for climate change adaptation at World Wildlife Fund US.
Like El Niño itself, the Andean region faces some of the most severe consequences from climate change, but the hardships for its people and economies will reverberate across the globe.
How climate change and El Niño are converging in South America this year
Hot water at the surface of the Pacific Ocean during an El Niño year ripples below the sea and into the sky, as warm water leads to more evaporation, which in turn causes more rainfall. In South America, the Andes mountains channel that moisture so that some areas get a lot more precipitation, while others get much less. But subregions like the Peruvian Andes can experience both extremes in a season, a brutal whiplash from floods to drought, making it extraordinarily difficult for residents to adapt.
“It’s hitting both sides of the Andes, in the Amazon and on the coast,” Martin said. The Amazon river, which has its source in Peru, is suffering from a severe drought this year. Alongside extreme heat, the weather has contributed to wildlife deaths, including dozens of Amazon river dolphins. The dry weather also left the Pantanal wetlands just south of the Amazon rainforest primed to burn. Fires ignited by lightning charred critical wetlands for jaguars.
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William Wroblewski/ AFP via Getty Images
South America’s Pacific coast, meanwhile, is poised to receive intense rain as well as more flooding from high tides through the end of the year. The high water levels are likely to wash out roads, bridges, and other pieces of low-lying infrastructure. And in the coming years, rising average temperatures will continue to amplify these extremes.
For people living in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, this year’s El Niño is occurring on top of years of shifting temperature and precipitation baselines. And the effects of severe heat and drought are particularly strong on children. “They are affected in going to school because of the high temperatures. Sometimes they have to walk many hours to reach their school,” said Marianela Montes de Oca, country director for Save the Children in Bolivia. “It’s starting to affect children with gastrointestinal infections because of the lack of water.” As wells, ponds, and cisterns dry out, children can end up drinking from contaminated sources.
These changes are making it harder for subsistence farmers to survive as losses mount due to weather extremes, leading many to move away from rural areas toward cities. In countries like Bolivia, that migration presents social challenges. Much of the rural population is Indigenous and speaks languages like Quechua or Aymara, so it’s harder for them to integrate in cities where Spanish is far more common, limiting access to jobs, housing, and health care.
Bolivia has been a bright spot in global development, growing its economy and making advances in key development indicators like reducing infant mortality and poverty. Bolivia has an extreme poverty rate of 11.1 percent based on the most recent assessments from the World Bank. The Bolivian government set a goal of ending it entirely by 2025. But according to the United Nations World Food Programme, climate change is threatening to undo some of this progress. Unless the pace of warming decreases, Bolivia is poised to see a 22 percent increase in food insecurity by the 2050s. This year’s El Niño provides a stark example of conditions that could become more frequent as record-breaking temperatures triggered drought emergency declarations across 20 percent of the country, threatening thousands of acres of farmland.
Peru has also been getting hammered by extreme weather this year. Heavy rains since January killed at least 77 people, made almost 50,000 homes uninhabitable, and left more than 800,000 people in need of government assistance, about 30 percent of them children. Cyclone Yaku in March triggered floods and mudslides, wiping out the entire rice crop for some farmers.
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Klebher Vasquez/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The weather this year is also harming public health, even in areas that didn’t directly experience torrential downpours or searing temperatures. Because of their altitude, most major Peruvian cities have historically had very few mosquitos. But with rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns, mosquitos are climbing further up, and so are the diseases they carry. “El Niño always comes associated with dengue outbreaks,” said Melissa Allemant Salas, humanitarian response leader for Save the Children Peru.
The spread of dengue in Peru has already exceeded the outbreak in 2017, during the last big El Niño. According to the Pan American Health Organization, the Andean region as a whole has seen 550,000 cases of dengue and 640 deaths from the infection this year. Peru accounts for more than 270,000 cases and 448 deaths, including 47 children — an “outrageous number,” Allemant Salas said, for a disease that under normal conditions should be easily controllable.
This all adds up to a tremendous economic toll. Stanford’s Callahan co-authored a study in the journal Science this year looking at the dollar values of damages from past El Niño events. The El Niño in 1997-98, one of the most severe on record prior to 2023, led to $5.7 trillion in income losses around the world. But the toll was concentrated in tropical countries like Peru that experienced the biggest weather perturbations. Five years after that El Niño, economic growth in Peru declined by 6.2 percentage points. The income for the average Peruvian would have been $1,246 greater in 2003 had the 1997-98 El Niño not occurred, the authors calculated.
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Hugo Curotto/AFP via Getty Images
Callahan explained that the lingering economic costs of El Niño are not just due to things like repairing bridges and providing medical care to people afflicted in the immediate wake of these events, but often due to a long-term shift in priorities in places that experience these disasters. Rather than building schools or investing in research, money goes toward seawalls, drainage systems, and relocating people. “The underlying [investments in the] most productive drivers of economic growth — the drivers of productivity and technology — get diverted toward disaster response and recovery,” Callahan said.
It may take months or years to calculate the price tag of the current El Niño, but the scale of the havoc it has already wrought means it’s likely to become the most costly one on record. Scientists are also rushing to figure out how future changes in the climate will blend into El Niño events, but growing populations, particularly in coastal regions vulnerable to storms and rising seas, will put more people in harm’s way, raising the expected damage toll.
South America is adapting, but countries need help to endure the changes ahead
There are solutions to many of these problems stemming from El Niño and climate change. The main strategy is anticipating threats rather than just responding to them. Over the long term, the goal is to reduce overall risk by incorporating models of future warming into current land, development, and disaster plans.
“It’s much easier to build a drainage system when you’re building a city than to have to retrofit it,” said David Sislen, who leads disaster risk management for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank. “For every dollar invested in risk reduction, you save four dollars in economic impacts.”
In October, the World Bank gave Peru a $750 million loan to help the country adapt to climate change, including tactics like more resilient urban planning, accounting for changes in demographics and flooding risk. There is also work underway to deploy early warning systems that could offer more time to prepare ahead of a severe weather event, saving lives and property. These systems could, for example, facilitate evacuations, help governments allocate relief supplies before a flash flood cuts off a remote village, or implement sanitation procedures and deploy mobile hand-washing stations when infection risks are high.
The challenge is not just protecting physical infrastructure but keeping networks of first responders, local governments, and funding agencies running after a major storm. “Making sure that the public sector continues functioning even when you’ve had a big event is a huge piece of the puzzle,” Sislen said.
The core problem, though, is that countries like Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru are among those that produced the fewest greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming, but they are already facing some of the most extensive consequences.
Many of the changes they’re enduring are beyond their means. So at the COP28 climate change summit, the top priority for these countries is to get more money to cope with ongoing devastation and to prepare for the bigger threats that lie ahead.
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Though the meeting is still underway, delegates agreed to begin putting money into a loss and damage fund aimed at compensating countries already facing the impacts of climate change, with at least $420 million pledged so far. Just creating this fund was a hard-fought process as many wealthy countries opposed any hint that they were liable for the harms generated by their appetite for fossil fuels.
But pledges on paper don’t guarantee they will be fulfilled. Countries are already struggling to meet past cash commitments. In past climate negotiations, governments promised to pool $100 billion per year to finance adaptation projects in less wealthy places, but they blew past their 2020 deadline. According to some estimates, countries finally met this goal last year, but groups like Oxfam say they’re still nowhere close and the actual amount of money spent under this program was $24.5 billion per year.
These shortfalls are troubling not only because it means people in some of the most vulnerable regions will have a harder time adapting to climate change, but also because it makes it harder to solve the problem overall. To limit climate change, at any level, every country in the world will eventually have to zero out their greenhouse gas emissions. Without outside help, developing countries may choose to prioritize burning coal, oil, and natural gas to bolster their economies in the near term, slowing the campaign to decarbonize the global economy.
The stakes are higher than ever, and at the tail end of the hottest year humanity has ever experienced, the consequences of uncontrolled climate change have never been more vivid. The question is whether the soaked, parched, and baked landscapes in El Niño’s direct line of fire will spur any more action at the table in the UAE.