Gardi Sugdub is an island in the Panamanian Caribbean, 100 kilometers east of the port of Colón. It used to be 365 meters long and 137 meters wide, but those dimensions They begin to shrink as the waters advance and sink into the sea the overcrowded islet that for nearly 200 years has housed half a thousand families. More than 300 of them have voluntarily enrolled in a government program to settle in a small town on the mainland, a dramatic change in their way of life.
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“We are a little sad because we are going to leave behind the houses that we have known all our lives, the relationship with the sea, where we fish, where we bathe and where we receive tourists, but “The sea is sinking the island little by little.”Nadín Morales, 24, told the Associated Press (AP) earlier this month as she and her family packed their belongings.
Some 60 indigenous and Afro-descendant communities that occupy islets in Panamanian Caribbean and Pacific archipelagos, which protrude just half a meter above the ocean level, are included in the voluntary transfer program.
They are not only threatened by the rising waters that worsen between December and January, when the winds roughen the sea and the waves get bigger. Also due to the increase in sea surface temperature, which affects fishing, and due to the increasingly ferocious hurricanes.
These are regions where access to drinking water poses great challenges, since water sources are scarce and sometimes non-existent.
Similar dramas are repeated in the Maldives, an island republic south of India, as well as in dozens of archipelagos in Oceania, such as the Marshall Islands, and other small island countries such as Tuvalu, Nauru, Tokelau and Kiribati.
The beaches and other low-lying areas of the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina, as well as, to the northeast, the Roncador and Quitasueño keys and the Serrana and Serranilla banks, are also in danger. In the case of San Andrés, if the rise of Caribbean waters continues at the current rate, about 20 percent of the island would disappear by mid-century.
The areas of the world that are at risk of disappearing due to climate change
In case of The Maldives – a tourist paradise in the Indian Ocean with luxurious beach hotels – is impressive: nearly 80 percent of the territory is less than one meter above sea level and, with the continuous rise in water levels, it could definitively immerse themselves in the remainder of the century. But disaster can strike sooner: with a rise of 40 centimeters, which many expect by 2050, half of the Maldives’ territory would be under water.
In Oceania, the most critical situation is experienced by Tuvalu, an island country of less than 12 thousand inhabitants – the smallest population in the UN -, made up of nine atolls, of which two were devoured by the sea. At the rate that the ocean level is rising, by the end of the century, 95% of Tuvalu will be below the surface, which is why it is negotiating with the authorities of its neighbor Australia to relocate part or even all of its population.
Atolls, explains Geraldine Giradeau, a professor at Paris-Saclay University and an expert in Pacific affairs, “are extremely narrow strips of land, a few hundred meters, and sometimes barely tens of meters wide,” which, she told the newspaper, Parisian La Croix, makes them especially vulnerable.
Like Tuvalu, the Solomon Islands belong to the Commonwealth of Nations that emerged after the decolonization processes of the British Empire.
There, five islands of the archipelago – Kale, Rapita, Kakatina, Zollies and Rehana – have already disappeared under water. They were uninhabited, but rich vegetation grew in them.
The problem begins long before the submergence of those portions of land. These are regions where access to drinking water poses great challenges, since water sources are scarce and sometimes non-existent, and the phreatic deposits used in the pastbecome unusable because even before the flood, the rise in sea level salinizes the soil and these sources stop providing fresh water.
Coastal areas in danger from climate change
In late 2021, in a message to COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, Tuvalu’s foreign minister, Simon Kofe, became famous for a widely shared video he recorded, offering a powerful statement on the crisis. of his island country, dressed in a jacket and tie, but barefoot, with shorts and the sea water up to his knees.
From his official lectern anchored in the background, Kofe made other nations see that what is happening to Tuvalu is just a sign of what will happen in many regions of the globe, both islands and coastal areas. “We are sinking,” he said of his country, “but the same thing must happen to the whole world.”
“In Tuvalu we are sinking, but the same must happen to the whole world.”
The melting of the poles – and, very particularly, that of Greenland – is increasing the level of the oceans. But the waters rise even more due to the higher ocean temperatures derived from the climate change, since heat expands liquid bodies. And that heat on the sea surface increases the occurrence of hurricanes and storm surges.
The case of Greenland is especially critical, because when the ice on its surface melts, it falls directly into the North Atlantic. If the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, the oceans could rise by up to 7 meters. But it doesn’t take something so forceful to cause a catastrophe.: Climate experts warn that, if the increase in temperature on the planet continues at this rate, the seas could rise between 60 centimeters and 1.8 meters in the second half of the century, which would lead to disaster for thousands of islands. and coastal towns.
If the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, the oceans could rise by up to 7 meters.
Cities like New York or Miami, or Cartagena in the Colombian case, would see a good part of their territory submerged.
The authorities of the southern metropolis of Florida announced a few days ago an investment of 2.7 billion dollars this decade, to prevent flooding resulting from the rise in the level of the Atlantic. But that figure may be an understatement, and some estimates point to the need not for billions but for tens of billions of dollars in the decades to come.
What happens when cities do not have the wealth to prevent natural disasters?
All of this is much more complex in regions of the world that do not have the wealth of Miami, where it has not been possible to carry out these investments, and the inhabitants only have to evacuate, as is the case in African and Latin American countries.
Ayetoro, in Nigeria, was founded half a century ago in the development of a Christian utopia. Nicknamed ‘The Happy City’, its inhabitants were part of a community that sought to develop without social classes and without sin. But as is happening in dozens of towns on the west coast of central Africa, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, Ayetoro is being swallowed by the sea.
The World Bank estimates that Nigeria needs investments of almost $10 billion to address rising seas, a figure equivalent to 2 percent of the country’s GDP.
The government of Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa with 220 million inhabitants, a few years ago planned significant investments in coastal protection. But corruption, lack of planning and poor execution ruined the program.
In Ayetoro, the buildings sank into the sea and apart from the remains of precarious seawalls and foundations, on the coastline it is only possible to see demolished light poles.
Thousands have left, the AP agency reported this Monday in a detailed report, and those who remain had to move the church inland, but the sea has continued to approach and is now 30 meters from the new chapel. In the area surrounding the semi-destroyed town, the ocean has devoured about 10 square kilometers, something like 60 percent of the former urban area in three decades.
The World Bank estimates that Nigeria needs investments of almost $10 billion to address rising seas, a figure equivalent to 2 percent of the country’s GDP. The accelerated urbanization of the coasts, erosion and the loss of the mangroves that regulated the waters around the Niger River Delta, contributed to the disaster, as has happened in other coastal areas of the planet.
“Look,” said Manuel Jesús Hernández, 54, to journalist Angeline Montoya from the Parisian newspaper. Le Monde, last week, while pointing to a point in the water of the Gulf of Fonseca -, that’s where I was born. When I am in that place in my boat, sometimes I lean over the water and think that down there is my house.”
Like him, dozens of fishermen in this coastal area at the exit from Honduras to the Pacific have lost their homes, especially in the town of Cedeño, with 5,000 inhabitants, which has seen half of its territory submerged, with their homes , shops, hotels and restaurants, its school and the huts serving tourists on an almost disappeared beach.
Cyclones will be more intense, islands will face peaks of destruction and coastal erosion will call into question the use of populated coastlines.
“It is the Pacific, our boss, who has come to collect his taxes from us,” adds Hernández. “Everything is very sad.” Not far away, on the Caribbean islands, there are similar crises. As the expert Virginie Duval, from the Intergovernmental Group on Climate Change (Giec), sponsored by the UN, explained some time ago, after analyzing the situation of the Antillean archipelagos, the impacts will be multiple and devastating.
“The cyclones will be more intense, the islands will face peaks of destruction, coastal erosion will call into question the use of coastlines that are populated and have tourist activities and infrastructure, and the sea will challenge breakwaters and rock jetties,” adds Duval.
“We will have to replant mangroves and restore coral reefs,” he notes, while acknowledging that, with the warmer waters, the fishing that thousands of people rely on will also be affected. It is not a prediction for the future, but something that, in many regions of the planet, has already begun.
MAURICIO VARGAS
SENIOR WEATHER ANALYST
[email protected] /Instagram @mvargaslinares
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