According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), around 13.2 percent of global food produced is lost between harvest and retail, while an estimated 19 percent of global food production is wasted annually. Together, food loss and waste generate 8 to 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Methane from landfilled food waste adds to this impact as a separate greenhouse-gas source.
Food waste does not cause El Niño, which is a natural ocean–atmosphere pattern. However, El Niño can intensify pressure on food, water, soil and infrastructure, making avoidable food loss and waste harder to ignore. The two issues belong in the same discussion because both point to a larger challenge: societies need to handle climate stress more effectively while reducing avoidable greenhouse-gas emissions.
Within that wider context, food waste is one practical problem societies can act on now. Organic waste sent to landfill can generate methane. Suitable scraps that are properly collected, processed, and returned to land may instead help support soil health. In other words, the issue is not just how much food is wasted, but what happens to it after it leaves kitchens, shops, farms, and supply chains.
Food-waste claims should therefore be judged by a simple test: process, diversion, destination. What process happened to the food scraps? Were they genuinely kept out of landfill? And where did the resulting material go next? That pathway matters more than labels such as “green,” “compostable,” or “electric composter,” because climate and soil benefits depend on what happens to organic material. In short, the question is whether climate stress makes wasteful systems less defensible—and whether we can build better ones before the next disruption exposes the same weaknesses again.
El Niño as a climate stress test
In NOAA’s 13 August 2026 ENSO Diagnostic Discussion, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center forecasted a greater than 90% chance that El Niño would become a “very strong” event during Northern Hemisphere fall and winter 2026–27. For October–December 2026, NOAA’s probabilistic strength outlook gave a 69% chance that the three-month Relative Oceanic Niño Index, or RONI, would reach +2.5°C or higher. These figures describe forecast probabilities available at that time, not observations of the event’s eventual peak strength.
RONI is NOAA’s relative measure of sea-surface-temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region, adjusted for the tropical background state and expressed as a three-month running mean. It helps compare ENSO strength across time. Even so, a very strong index value changes the odds of characteristic weather patterns; it does not guarantee a particular flood, drought or regional outcome.
ENSO is one of the world’s major sources of year-to-year climate variability. Changes in the tropical Pacific can alter atmospheric circulation, storm tracks and rainfall far beyond the ocean itself. For food systems, those shifts can mean saturated farmland and erosion in some regions, or reduced water supplies, irrigation pressure and crop stress in others. After harvest, heat and disrupted transport or power systems can add further pressure after food moves through storage, distribution and retail.
Sources: NOAA CPC — ENSO Diagnostic Discussion; NOAA GFDL — August 2026 El Niño Predictions
The economic effects can persist after the weather signal fades. A 2023 Nature Communications study used a statistical climate-economy model to estimate that the 1997–98 El Niño was associated with about $2.1 trillion in cumulative global output losses, and the 2015–16 event with about $3.9 trillion over the event year and following three years. These model-based estimates describe macroeconomic output, not direct totals of insured losses, crop damage or disaster-recovery spending. Their value here is to show that climate-related disruption can be large, persistent and wider than the immediate weather event.
From climate vulnerability to food-system resilience
El Niño itself is natural, while human-caused warming changes the background climate in which natural variability operates. That leaves two different climate tasks. Adaptation means making food, water, soil and infrastructure systems better able to absorb stress. Mitigation means reducing greenhouse-gas emissions that add to warming. Food-waste diversion belongs mainly to mitigation. When properly processed compost is returned to soil, it can also support resilience by improving water retention and soil organic matter.
Prevention comes first. Food has already used land, water, fertilizer, energy, refrigeration, packaging, transport and labor before it reaches a kitchen. So, individual choices, municipal systems and product claims can be evaluated and managed. Avoiding edible food waste preserves more of those resources than any treatment applied after disposal. Composting, anaerobic digestion and other processing options become relevant when genuinely unavoidable food scraps remain.
A banana peel or yesterday’s rice may look insignificant once it reaches the bin, but it still enters a material pathway. If it is buried in a landfill, rapidly decomposing organic matter can generate methane. If suitable scraps are biologically processed and the resulting compost is appropriately returned to land, carbon, nutrients and organic matter can re-enter a soil pathway instead. The environmental question is therefore what happens to the material after the kitchen.
That is the bridge between the El Niño context and food-waste management: climate shocks reveal vulnerability, while food waste provides a practical example of an emissions and resource-flow problem that people, cities and waste systems can actually change.
Why food waste matters: methane and lost resources
In the United States, EPA estimates that food waste makes up about 24% of municipal solid waste disposed of in landfills but is responsible for about 58% of fugitive methane emissions from U.S. municipal solid-waste landfills. EPA also estimates that about 61% of methane generated by landfilled food waste is not captured by landfill-gas collection systems, in part because food decomposes quickly and can produce methane before collection systems are fully operating. Those percentages are specific to U.S. landfill conditions, but they illustrate a broader mechanism: rapidly decomposing food can become a disproportionately important methane source when it remains in landfill pathways.
The issue is scale, not one discarded meal. Large volumes of organic material can create avoidable methane when they are landfilled, while nutrients and organic matter are removed from potential recovery pathways. Here, “landfill diversion” means more than making scraps smaller, drier or easier to store. The material must actually avoid general landfill disposal and enter a defined treatment or use pathway.
Source: U.S. EPA — Quantifying Methane Emissions from Landfilled Food Waste
Composting, dehydration and the problem of misleading labels
Household food-waste appliances are often grouped under labels such as “electric composter,” even though their processes can differ substantially. Some systems are designed to support aerobic biological decomposition by microorganisms. Others mainly heat, grind or dehydrate food scraps to remove moisture and reduce weight and volume. The label matters because these different processes can produce very different materials.
EPA defines composting as managed, aerobic biological decomposition of organic materials by microorganisms. In plain language, microorganisms break the material down under controlled conditions where oxygen is available. That biological process is different from physical size or moisture reduction.
By contrast, residential grinding and dehydrating appliances can produce a much smaller, drier food residue without producing finished compost. That dried food residue may still need biological composting, curing or another appropriate downstream treatment before it can be treated as finished compost. Dehydration can still reduce mess, odor, storage volume and transport weight; it simply should not be confused with biological composting or with proof that landfill disposal was avoided.
The practical test: process, diversion and destination
The three-part test introduced at the start is useful because it follows the material rather than the marketing language. Process asks what actually happened to the food scraps: biological decomposition, dehydration, digestion, incineration or something else. Diversion asks whether the material genuinely stayed out of general landfill disposal. Destination asks where the resulting material went and what happened to it next.
Lifecycle factors sit around that pathway. Electricity, process emissions and transport can change the result; for product-level claims, manufacturing, durability and maintenance also matter. A machine may reduce a pile of scraps dramatically, but if its dried residue ultimately enters general trash, the core disposal pathway has not necessarily changed. Conversely, a biological process still needs an appropriate final use or treatment before strong climate claims are justified.
This is why comparative evidence needs clear boundaries. A review and meta-analysis of 82 studies, mostly life-cycle assessments, found that aerobic composting and anaerobic digestion generally performed better than waste-to-energy and landfill-gas-to-energy for climate-change impacts in the studies reviewed. The authors also found substantial variation in system boundaries and no single treatment option that performed best across every environmental category. The lesson is not that one label always wins; it is that the full pathway determines the result.
Why the soil pathway matters
Avoiding landfill methane is only one part of the composting pathway. The other is what happens when properly processed compost reaches land. EPA’s 2025 scientific review found broad support for benefits including increased soil organic matter, improved water infiltration and retention, lower compaction and reduced erosion. Those properties can help soils cope with both dry periods and heavy rainfall.
Source: U.S. EPA — Environmental Value of Applying Compost
For the specific pathway in which food waste is composted and then land applied, compared with landfilling the same food waste, EPA’s synthesis reports roughly 78% lower greenhouse-gas emissions and more than three times greater carbon sequestration. Those figures describe the composting-plus-land-application pathway represented in the reviewed evidence. They are not a universal reduction factor for every composting device, compost pile, municipal program or output.
That boundary is important, but so is the mechanism. Keeping suitable organics out of landfill can reduce exposure to methane, while returning well-managed compost to soil can restore organic matter and improve water-related soil properties. This is where mitigation and resilience can intersect—through the material pathway, not because composting changes El Niño.
Follow the material, not the label
A smaller pile of food waste is not automatically a climate solution, and a green label is not evidence of a biological process. Strong environmental claims should trace the material from kitchen input through treatment to final destination and show what changed along the way.
To evaluate a household appliance, a community program or a broader waste strategy, the questions are the same: What process occurred? Was landfill disposal genuinely avoided? Where did the material go next? If a claim cannot answer those questions, it may describe convenience or waste handling, but it has not yet established a climate benefit. El Niño reminds us why resilience matters; food waste shows that some emissions and resource losses remain within our control. Follow the material: process, diversion, destination.
Author Bio & Disclosure
Matthew Moore is a guest contributor. His work focuses on biological waste treatment, climate resilience and evidence-based environmental communication.
Disclosure: Moore is affiliated with GEME, a developer of microbial composting systems. No GEME product, award or commercial claim is discussed in this article. Claims concerning El Niño, methane, composting and climate impacts are based on independent NOAA, EPA, IPCC and peer-reviewed sources. Pathway-level findings cited here should not be interpreted as a product-specific lifecycle assessment.
