sataniccapitalist reblogged
sataniccapitalist reblogged
Republicans are eager to decry a “Biden border crisis.” But the current wave of migration at the southern border is the result of a humanitarian crisis in Central America that has been years in the making.
Citizens of the “Northern Triangle” region — Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador — have long suffered from gang-related violence, frequent extortion, government corruption, and high levels of poverty. Over the past few months, though, another factor has added an additional push to make the dangerous journey north: continuing devastation from back-to-back hurricanes.
Hurricanes Eta and Iota, both super-powerful Category 4 hurricanes, made landfall in November 2020 within a two-week span, ripping through Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. The storms brought torrential rain and resulting flash flooding and landslides. They left more than 200 people dead and another 5.3 million people in need of assistance, including more than 1.8 million children, according to Unicef’s estimates. Many families lost their homes, their belongings, and access to water and livelihoods.
The hurricanes delivered yet another shock to a region that already experienced the highest levels of violence and poverty in the world and was facing an economic downturn from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It’s concerning that many parents lost their jobs because of the pandemic and then lost their belongings, houses, and crops because of the hurricanes,” Laurent Duvillier, a spokesperson for Unicef’s Latin America and Caribbean regional office, said. “These children and their families are now left with very little food, very little safe water, and very little money to survive.”
In the four months since the hurricanes, recovery has been slow. Most families have left official shelters to return to their communities where rehabilitation work has started but living conditions and access to services and income have heavily deteriorated. More families continue to be pushed into poverty and, absent urgent action, more children are likely to become malnourished and drop out of school. Agricultural communities hit by the storm are also only beginning to see the impacts of last season’s crop failures.
All of this, experts say, is helping push migrants out of their home countries and toward the US.
[…]
There are also ongoing infrastructure problems. More than 1.5 million children continue to be exposed to life-threatening diseases due to contaminated water systems, including wells and latrines. More than 1,200 schools have been partially damaged or destroyed, some of which were still buried under sand or covered by mud when Duvillier visited in January.
The hurricanes have also made it harder to access roads. In one community in Santa Barbara, powerful landowners consequently built private roads through their properties and started charging people who had no other means of travel for access, Eldridge said.
The ongoing challenges in countries affected by the hurricanes have made the prospect of fleeing north more attractive — and people who have been waiting for the right moment to do so see an opportunity in the change of administration in the US to one that has taken a more humane approach to migration.
Eldridge said that he was surprised by how savvy people even in small, rural towns are about changes in US immigration policy and how it might affect their chances of successfully crossing the border. (At this point, the Biden administration is still turning away the vast majority of migrants arriving at the border on pandemic-related grounds, but it is accepting unaccompanied children, asylum seekers who were sent to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols to await their day in court in the US, and some families with young children that Mexico has refused to take back.)
“Many families have nothing to go back to and are now left with little options to survive. Unless more humanitarian support is provided to Central American countries affected by these tropical storms, unless conditions are created in communities for people to be able to stay, it is expected that more families will migrate north in search for a better future for their children,” Duvillier said.
While Republicans want to call the Central American migrant wave a “crisis”, the real root cause is due to the fact that the Northern Triangle region was devastated by two major hurricanes (Eta and Iota) in a short time span, in addition to the decades-long instability and humanitarian crisis plaguing the region, which propels migrants into making the journey north to the USA.
Only 90s kids will remember....
When category 5 hurricanes were a notably rare occurrence.
For those who wants the numbers, there were only 22 Cat-5 Atlantic hurricanes from 1850 when we began using this scale to 2000 (only 2 in the ‘90s). There have been 13 since 2000. They also seem to be growing longer in average duration, especially since the 1970s, but this may be different standards of recording.
sataniccapitalist reblogged
undergrowth-feed-deactivated202
Where humans have the money, we sometimes build storm defenses like seawalls to protect our coastal cities. But coastal development can often destroy natural defenses like coastal marshes or mangrove swamps. These ecosystems dampen waves and reduce storm surge flooding, and mangroves can even reduce wind speeds.
The protections provided by coastal ecosystem services are typically estimated by carefully looking at a single area or event. A new study led by East Carolina University’s Jacob Hochard took another tack, comparing the economic impacts of tropical cyclones around the world with satellite data.
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