Shaun Martin is vice president for adaptation and resilience at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the United States.“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” A century later, H.G. Wells’s warning reads less like philosophy and more like a prediction for the near future. Last week, the World Meteorological Organization forecast that a powerful El Niño – a naturally occurring climate pattern marked by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Pacific – will develop in 2026, becoming potentially one of the strongest on record, capable of triggering floods, droughts and extreme heat across the globe.This warning should make one thing crystal clear: we need to move faster to adapt to the rapidly changing climate.