India could lose about $ 50 billion in economic output in 2027 as an El Niño, now building in the Pacific, pushes up temperatures worldwide, according to the Allianz Climate Economics Report 2026, the India Today highlighted. The global bill is put at roughly $451 billion, or about 0.24% of projected GDP across the 144 economies studied. China, the United States and India would together bear nearly 60% of it.
China faces the steepest decline, at $147 billion, followed by the United States at $91 billion. India’s $50 billion puts it third. Measured against the size of each economy, the ranking changes. South Korea would lose 0.51% of baseline GDP and Indonesia 0.41%. The European Union’s 27 members would lose a combined Dollar 24 billion, about 0.09% of their output as highlighted by India Today.
El Niño is marked by unusually warm surface water in the central and eastern tropical Pacific. Its effects reach well beyond the region, altering rainfall and temperatures in distant countries. Allianz’s analysts say those shifts hurt economies by cutting worker productivity, lowering crop yields and raising electricity demand as people use more cooling. To estimate the scale, they drew on how economies responded to temperature changes during the 2023–24 El Niño.
The current event is developing through 2026 and is expected to strengthen into early 2027, which is why most of the economic impact is projected for next year.
Households may feel the effects at the checkout as well. Allianz estimates the episode could add about 0.42 percentage points to global headline inflation and around 0.65 points to food inflation. The $451 billion estimate covers only losses linked to temperature. It excludes damage from floods, droughts and wildfires, which El Niño can also make more likely. Allianz describes the figure as a sensitivity analysis, not a forecast, so actual losses could be higher.
El Niño and Inflation The report estimates that an El Niño event could raise global headline inflation by an average of 0.42 percentage points and food inflation by 0.65 percentage points.
The estimates come as the economic costs of climate-related disasters continue to mount. Extreme weather events caused an estimated $210 billion in economic losses globally in 2025 alone. While the figure was 32% lower than the $307 billion recorded in 2024, it remained 20% above the average annual losses recorded between 2000 and 2019.
