Forecasts point to a return of the El Niño climate cycle this summer, and engineers will be charged with ensuring infrastructure and other critical systems continue to function under increasingly extreme climate conditions.
For engineers across all disciplines, El Niño presents a unique challenge. Distinct from the La Niña pattern – which typically brings widespread rainfall and flooding – El Niño is associated with hotter and drier conditions, concentrated particularly in Eastern and Southern Australia.
These environmental pressures can catalyse bushfires, stress water supplies, increase heat loads on infrastructure, and cause transport network delays.
In Australian cities, extreme heat places greater demands on electricity networks and railway systems. Buildings’ cooling loads increase, while urban heat islands amplify already challenging conditions in densely developed areas.
Across the built environment, engineers are responding to these pressures through newly adapted designs and tried and true strategies. These include improved passive cooling, higher-performance building envelopes, reflective materials, increased urban greening, and infrastructure developed to operate safely under higher design temperatures than those historically adopted.
Rather than designing solely for historical climate records, many projects are now seeking to incorporate future climate projections into asset planning. This progression represents a notable shift in engineering practice, requiring infrastructure that is commissioned today to be able to operate under future climate conditions.
These pressures are heightened for regional communities, where resilience planning extends beyond physical assets in order to maintain continuity of services during prolonged heatwaves and elevated bushfire risks.
Prepare for a price surge
While El Niño events in the 1982-83, 1997-88, 2015-16 and 2023-24 summers have been among the strongest on record, forecasts suggest the 2026-27 cycle could be even more severe, with drought and flooding damaging harvests and global food supply.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs predict that a major El Niño event could contribute to a 15.8 per cent increase in global food commodity prices.
And one of El Niño’s most immediate implications for Australian engineering is the pressure it places on water resources.
Hydrologists increasingly view drought resilience through a systems lens rather than focusing solely on storage capacity. Water security now encompasses catchment behaviour, groundwater interaction, environmental flows, urban demand management and climate-informed forecasting.
CSIRO is helping water managers better understand how changing rainfall patterns affect streamflow, groundwater recharge and long-term water availability. Improved hydrological models allow operators to assess multiple climate scenarios, informing decisions regarding reservoir operations and infrastructure investment. The objective is to build adaptive water systems that are capable of maintaining reliability despite increasing environmental uncertainty.
READ: Australia’s massive water footprint is a problem for engineers
Cyclone resilience
Although El Niño typically reduces the overall number of tropical cyclones affecting Australia, it does not eliminate the risk of severe events. A single intense cyclone can still cause widespread damage, making resilient building design a year-round engineering priority.
That reality continues to drive research at the Cyclone Testing Station (CTS) at James Cook University in Townsville.
Led by Chief Engineer Dr David Henderson FIEAust CPEng EngExec, the facility investigates how buildings perform under extreme wind loading and how construction practices can be improved to reduce damage during severe storms.
The CTS examines how complete structural systems behave under realistic loading conditions. Researchers combine laboratory experiments with field investigations following major cyclone events, allowing observed failures to inform future testing programs and engineering guidance.
“CTS laboratory testing has identified component-level weaknesses in roofing, cladding, windows, doors and structural connections, with findings translated into revised product testing methods, fixing requirements, connection capacities and installation details within Australian standards,” Henderson said.
The laboratory’s wind-loading experiments examine the interaction between aerodynamic pressures, structural framing, roof systems, wall connections and fasteners. Instrumented test structures measure pressure distributions, load transfer and structural response under simulated extreme wind conditions.
One of the most significant engineering insights from decades of cyclone research is that catastrophic failures often begin with relatively small weaknesses in the building envelope.
“CTS post-event damage surveys provide real-world validation by revealing which failure mechanisms repeatedly occur during cyclones and severe storms, enabling changes that address repeated and consequential building failures,” Henderson said.
“Damage surveys have consistently shown that breaches to roofs, windows and doors can rapidly increase internal pressure, leading to progressive structural failure. These findings have resulted in greater emphasis on opening protection, garage door performance, cladding robustness and designing buildings for realistic internal pressure conditions.
“Wind-driven rain investigations have also informed improved detailing around windows, doors, roof edges, penetrations and wall systems to reduce water ingress and the consequential internal damage that often follows severe wind events.”
READ: “We dodged a bullet”: Australia might not be so lucky when the next Alfred hits
Synoptic downbursts make for a growing challenge
Engineers have been also examining another damaging wind hazard: synoptic downbursts, which can generate intense, highly localised wind speeds capable of damaging infrastructure.
These destructive forces often occur with little warning, and the frequency and force of downburst-driven transmission failures are rising.
These winds differ from what transmission towers are accustomed to withstanding. They are short, powerful bursts of cold air that plunge to the ground before fanning out horizontally.
Recent failures of transmission infrastructure have highlighted the destructive potential of these events, as well as the need for improved understanding of their loading characteristics.
Recent research has expanded into physical testing to better understand downburst wind profiles and how they affect structures, with engineers seeking to incorporate these hazards more explicitly into resilience planning.
READ: How engineers confront the extremes of a changing climate
Preparing for the long term
Preparing for this El Niño pattern requires thinking beyond a single weather cycle.
A pressing engineering question isn’t just whether this year’s El Niño is stronger than previous events, but whether today’s design criteria adequately accounts for the climate conditions buildings are likely to experience over the next 30 to 50 years.
Australia’s engineering profession is increasingly shifting towards adaptive infrastructure capable of accommodating a broader range of future climate conditions. Climate projections are being integrated into asset management frameworks, resilience assessments are informing investment decisions, and multidisciplinary collaboration between engineers, climate scientists and emergency planners is becoming standard practice.
With intensifying climate pressures, engineering solutions continue to evolve through better data, improved modelling and evidence-based standards. Whether responding to extreme heat, drought, cyclones or wind hazards, Australian engineers remain at the forefront of adapting the built environment.
