Otis is the fiercest hurricane registered In the Mexican Pacific. Days after the catastrophe in Guerrero, Bernardo Bastien, researcher at the Institute of Atmosphere and Climate Change of UNAM, heard stories of the survivors: ship captains who touched the death and reporters who, from one moment to another, passed To inform torrential rains to face the fury of the hurricane that swept Acapulco in October 2023, a port with about one million inhabitants.
After collecting these testimonies, Bastien and his colleagues from the Institute of Oceanography Scripps, from the University of California, asked: if the mangroves that once bordered the coast would have been there, Would the disaster have been the same? The result of this inquiry was published in the magazine Science of the Total Environment (by Scientedirect).
To begin with, their suspicions about the protection that mangroves could grant to the Acapulco coast were based on the intricate roots of this ecosystem, located between the sea and the edge of the continent, dissipate the energy of the waves, stabilize the sediments – which prevents coastal erosion – and reduces floods.
Computer models and field studies demonstrate these qualities with evidence. For example, researchers from the University of Cantabria and the University of Santa Cruz They evaluated the risk of flooding along 700,000 kilometers of coast in 59 countries; They found that, without mangroves, direct flood damage would increase above 65,000 million dollars a year; Above this, 15 million additional people would be exposed to these risks.
Your quality as storm shock absorbers is also documented. An analysis Of the night lights in locations affected by hurricanes reveals that those with mangrove belts experience few blackouts compared to those that do not enjoy these natural barriers.
Remember Acapulco … of those mangroves
The mangroves of Mexico represent 6% of the world total, but before there were more. Guerrero was a region with many mangroves, but at the end of the 20th and early twenty -first century, the entity experienced one of the greatest annual losses of these flood forests in the country. According to Conabio, In 1980, Guerrero had 16,346 hectares of mangroves; 40 years later, there were only 7,730.
“In the last 40 years, we have deforested the mangrove coasts to give way to tourist developments and projects that prioritize another type of capital, Under the mentality of developing the coasts to attract tourism and economic spills, ”Bastien tells Wired in Spanish. “We usually believe that a place is becoming richer, when in reality it is becoming poorer in terms of natural capital.” Concept that, according to the researcher and geographer, is that great living cellar that we can use in our day to day to Have a human well -being: breathing clean air, living with nature and having drinking water.
Otis found Mexico with these offenses and evidenced his vulnerability. It was not a common hurricane; He quickly intensified near the coast. Despite the advances to predict the development of these phenomena, it was not possible to predict their fast evolution of tropical storm to Hurricane Category 5. This change occurred shortly before touching earth. The wind speed increased 115 miles per hour in just 24 hours, an unusual phenomenon that left little time to alert the population. It was a devastating hurricane, with more than 50 deaths and 30 missing, and became the most expensive in Mexican history, with losses that exceeded 20 times what insurers paid for hydrometeorological disasters in Mexico for 2022.
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