Environment secretary Angela Eagle has urged people to store supplies in case of extreme weather events.

An unprecedented El Nino event – when sea temperatures in tropical eastern Pacific rise 0.5C above the long-term average – is forecast to reach more than 3C in the coming months, making this year’s event “the largest since the 19th century”, according to the Met Office.

El Nino creates a heightened risk of drought in the tropics, southern Africa and north-east Australia, while north-western Europe – including the UK – is likely to experience wetter and stormier conditions in the coming autumn and early winter, the forecaster said.

Seriously

And the environment secretary said people in the UK should prepare for the increased risk of national weather emergencies.

She told The Guardian: “We’re about to experience probably the largest El Nino that has ever been seen, and that will lead to drier summers, wetter winters, with more extreme storms in this country.

“It will do a lot more damage in Asia with flooding, and therefore I think that we need to take it seriously.

Astonishing

“If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven’t.

“So some of it is that kind of preparation for just being a bit more resilient.”

Professor Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical hazards, University College London, last month said the Met Office and other scientific forecasts “suggest that the world is in for one hell of a ride”.

“The astonishing and unprecedented amount of heat building across the eastern Pacific Ocean is all but certain to make this the most powerful El Nino in living memory – possibly even the biggest in several centuries,” he said.

Survive

George Monbiot, the country's leading campaigning environmental journalist, wrote in The Guardian today: "The way [Angela Eagle] put it suggested that either she hasn’t grasped the magnitude of what we face, or she is trivialising the issue."

He explained: "Certainly, those of us who have the money and capacity to store food should do so: after all, no one else has our backs. 

"But the idea that such individuated solutions would be any use in the face of a societal catastrophe is neoliberal nonsense. 

"As always, it is the poor and excluded, with neither the cash nor the space to lay down significant supplies, who will be hit first and worst. 

"Social breakdown would happen in days. The UK government, then, is being serious about neither the measures required to prevent climate catastrophe nor the measures required to survive it."

This Author

Rob Freeman is a reporter with Press Association. Additional reporting from Brendan Montague, editor of The Ecologist.