July 25, 2008
Please read the following urgent appeal for support for the victims of heavy rains in eastern Guatemala, particularly La Union Zacapa, a Chorti Maya region near the border with Honduras. Over the past couple days, dozens of people have been killed by mudslides, immense damage has been done to crops and homes. Thousands have fled their houses, and are without food or homes. The rains continue with no sign of stopping.
After several years straight of unusual rains, scientist have confirmed what Guatemalans suspected, this is not ‘normal' weather, it is the result of global warming. This morning the first truck full of food for the shelters, sent by Rights Action through the Coordinator of Chorti Organizations, COMUNDICH, is reaching La Union.
But when the rains finally stop, there will be a long hard road to recovery.
Please donate to help these Refugees of Global Warming.
<https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=446>
Please redistribute this information. If you want on or off this e-list, or have anything to say about this urgent action:
info@rightsaction.org.
With their road washed out and covered with fallen trees, families try to determine the safest route to evacuate their village.
**Refugees of Global Warming**
Eastern Guatemala Devastated by Floods and Mudslides
Over 28 People Feared Dead in La Union Zacapa
Over the past few days local organizations report that at least 28 people have been killed in mud slides in La Union, Zacapa. Ten shelters have been created and villagers are fleeing the region.
Mudslides and flooded rivers have destroyed homes and devastated crops. Dozens of villages are completely cut off from road access, provoking a crisis in access to food availability. Yesterday afternoon the President o Guatemala declared a State of Disaster.
Similar conditions have been reported across eastern Guatemala, particularly in Camotan and Jocotan in Chiquimula, in Morales, Izabal, in Purula, Baja Verapaz, in Xenahu, Teleman, Panzos, La Tinta, Chisec, and Santa Cruz in Alta Verapaz. As news is only beginning to trickle out, there is not yet clarity as to the extent of the disaster.
**Polar Bears Are Not the Only Victims**
The image of a Polar bear stranded on a raft of the melting ice cap has become a symbol of the effects of global warming. Unfortunately images of poor families buried in mud should also become a popularly understood visual representation of global warming.
A home in La Union covered in a mudslide. We hope the family got out, but no one knows for certain yet.
**Global Warming Increases Tropical Rainfall**
This week's floods and mudslides are the effects of constant, heavy rains. Guatemalans have experiences heavier then normal rains over the past few years, some in the form of hurricanes, and they have provoked enormous damages. We are accustomed to hearing about massive destruction caused by hurricanes. But the damage this week in Eastern Guatemala is very similar to what happened during recent hurricanes.
The massive damages and deaths in hurricanes Mitch and Stan were not caused by the force of the winds, the factor by which a storm is categorized as a hurricane, they were caused by the shear quantity of rain they produced.
The increase in tropical rainfall over the past few years is a reality, it is global warming, and it is every bit as much a disaster and an emergency as hurricanes. The world must respond.
In August 2007 NASA scientists released a study which surveyed tropical rainfall levels over the past 27 years, and observed that the highest levels of rainfall happened over the last five years. They found that the level of rainfall on the planet as a whole has not changed, but the level in the tropics has changed considerably, an increase of 5%.
The increased rainfall is not distributed across the tropics like blanket, how rainfall is distributed depends on climactic convection routes that channel rainfall along certain paths. Global warming provokes what some have ironically termed a ‘rich get richer and poor get poorer' effect in which humid areas become more humid and dry areas become dryer.
**The Poor Get Poorer**
The climactic shift that is taking place is playing itself out economically, as if mimicking the global economic system, the climactic system is making the poor poorer. The massive flooding and the less dramatic but just as real droughts are causing millions of dollars worth of damages to crops in Guatemala alone.
The vast majority of these damages are to the crops of small producers, subsistence farmers who due to the history of internationally sponsored violent repression of land and social reform movements plant small tracts of marginal land most vulnerable to the effects of the climate, such as steep inclines. For similar historic reasons, these farmers have no safety net, no insurance, and whatever government programs are created to help bail out producers is generally monopolized by large plantations with political influence.
Mudslides from steep inclines which for lack of access to land have been farmed.
**Global Warming Refugees**
The logical consequence that this has produced is environmental refugees, refugees not only in the moment they are temporarily housed in shelters and resettlement camps, but refugees who months later, once international aid (if they were luck enough to have received any) has petered out, and they have no food since their crops were destroyed, are forced to migrate, literally risking their lives to work as undocumented workers in the United States sending money home to feed their broken families.
The roads are filled with families fleeing their homes to move into temporary shelters.
**Environmental Impunity: Blaming the Victim, Rewarding the Culprit**
When the world was first learning about global warming, the popular understanding was that poor people were the cause of global warming.
Images of massive deforestation in the Amazon were explained away as the result of poverty; that the poor people were moving in and cutting dawn rainforests.
Today general public is beginning to understand that that is not the case; that Carbon emissions in industrialized countries are the principal agents of global warming, and that global deforestation has been principally provoked by transnational logging companies satisfying demand for tropical hardwoods in wealthier nations.
Even if we are beginning to better understand the causes, we have not been implementing solutions. The only major international mechanism to combat Global Warming is the Carbon Credits Mechanism. Not only is it enough, it is possibly having a negative impact, allowing polluters to keep on polluting by buy credits, credits which are sometimes issued for activities of questionable value, such as hydroelectric dams and industrial forestry.
**Real Alternatives Exist**
The problems seem overwhelming, but there is no end to the possibilities for positive, impactful actions. Rights Action is supporting a few of the many alternative proposals, helping communities' carryout activities they propose that both resolve the communities' needs and reforest.
Following Hurricane Stan in 2005, Rights Action responded to the call for support from thirteen villages in Santa Catarina Ixtuahcan, Solola which were permanently displaced to resettlement villages, abandoning their agricultural lands and villages that were in a danger zone.
Though no longer threatened by annual mudslides, the resettled villagers no longer had any agricultural lands or any way to make a living. The communities created tree nurseries with a mixture of fruit trees and wood trees that they planted in the lands they abandoned.
The tree project will stabilize the soil to prevent mudslides, provide a sustainable source of income to the communities, and combat carbon emissions'.
In Northern Baja Verapaz and Southeastern Quiche, along the basin of the Chixoy Dam, the communities who were displaced by the massive hydroelectric project built in 1982, are seeking to establish extensions of fruit and forest trees in an over 40,000 acre region that has been deforested since Colonial times. The dam flooded out the agricultural lands of the communities, leaving them displaced and in extreme poverty for years. Reforestation of the marginal, historically degraded lands around the dam basin could generate sustainable livelihood for the communities and help stop global warming. Often thought of as a source of clean energy, large hydro electric dams deforest often vast areas and generate significant levels of carbon emissions from the rotting vegetation flooded out.
**What To Do**
Read Up - Keep track of what's going on and tell people about it.
Dream and Act - Envision new ways of living that keep our planet healthy and respects the rights of our global neighbors.
Demand Changes - Fight for policies that have force polluters to stop, provide incentives for truly environmentally friendly activities.
Give - Donate for the global warming refugees in their moment of crisis and support them as they rebuild a way of life and production that helps us all by combat climate change.
<https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=446>
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