Some nations have contributed very little to greenhouse gas emissions but their people are suffering acutely from their impact. Guatemala along with Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia and Haiti – identified among the 11 countries most at risk from climate chaos due to a combination of geography and poor governance, in a recent US government report on climate and global insecurity.
Eta and Iota marked the first time two major Atlantic hurricanes had been recorded in November, and came after six years of drought in Central America’s dry corridor, an impoverished region that is highly vulnerable to catastrophic extreme weather events such as storms, torrential rain, droughts and heatwaves – all of which are getting longer and more intense due to global heating.
Figures show that the largest increase in acute malnutrition cases and child deaths occurred in the regions hardest hit by floods and landslides caused by Eta and Iota. As women cut back on food to provide more for their children, the rate of low birthweight babies also skyrocketed. Guatemala has one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world with almost half of all children suffering chronic malnourishment, but rates are significantly higher among the country’s 24 Indigenous communities.
With few personal resources, little or no government assistance and NGOs struggling to cope with the unprecedented rise in food insecurity across Latin America, many Guatemalans have left in search of work and safety.
Acute malnutrition in Guatmalian children under five has more than doubled since 2019 due to the hurricane-related crop losses, volatile commodity prices and the pandemic. Many campesinos were unable to reach coffee plantations, where they can earn $5 to $7 a day, because damaged roads and bridges were left unrepaired for months.
Almost 300,000 Guatemalans have been detained at the US southern border since Eta and Iota struck. It’s unclear how many succeeded in entering the country, but 2021 is on track to break the remittance record, with more than $11bn sent home by Guatemalans in the first nine months of the year.
“It’s evident from the numbers at the US border and remittances that the climate crisis and Covid economic downturn has led to a rise in migration as people try to get away from hunger – you can’t deny this. It’s already happening and the projections are not positive,” said Ricardo Rapallo, the Guatemala representative for the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
Edwin Castellanos, member of the IPCC’s scientific group on vulnerability and adaptation and dean of the research institute at Guatemala’s Universidad del Valle, explained, “The future is going to continue like this – very dry periods followed by very wet periods – so we have to adapt to both extremes. But the same socioeconomic conditions that make Central America particularly vulnerable also make us invisible scientifically and therefore least able to access funding needed to adapt.” He pointed out that, “We know from journalistic reporting that climate change is causing migration, but we lack the hard data because we can’t get the funds to get the hard data, which makes accessing international green funds almost impossible. It’s a vicious cycle,” added Castellanos.
No comments:
Post a Comment