Millions of Americans voted for a coal-loving climate denier willing to condemn people around the globe to poverty, famine and death from climate change. It seems undeniable that the United States will become a rogue state on climate change. Benjamin Schreiber, climate director at Friends of the Earth US.
Guatemala is not Mexico despite the racist rants coming out of the Oval Office. Along with Honduras and El Salvador (referred to as The Northern Triangle) it is a region of the world that is most affected by climate change according to the Global Climate Risk Index.
This region of the Americas is vulnerable to natural disasters because of it’s geographical position. These three countries straddle 3 tectonic plates and 2 oceans that leave the population vulnerable to tropical cyclones, droughts and earthquakes. The Fuego volcano near Guatemala City is one of Central America’s most-active volcanos and it just recently erupted killing over 199 with scores still missing. In a interesting twist to the border mess, the compassion of the Shriners' Hospital for Children, admitted 6 young children that were treated for severe burns from the eruption, one young girl died yesterday from the severity of her burns.
Eco-Watch reports on the central reason for migration from Central America; climate change.
The impacts of these changing patterns are especially harmful to the region because farmers there rely heavily on coffee for cash and maize for subsistence, and neither are resilient in the face of weather that is either too dry or too wet.
Climate causes have been lost in a media narrative about migration that focuses on families or unaccompanied minors fleeing gang or drug related violence, but Seay-Fleming told The Daily Beast that the violence narrative was over-simplified. She said most current migrants crossing the Mexican border are from Guatemala, where economic insecurity is a greater driver of migration than violence, which is more often cited as a motivating factor by those from El Salvador and Honduras.
"Guatemala has the highest poverty rate and the highest food insecurity. It's seeing rates of food insecurity that have never been seen before," Seay-Fleming said.
Both Seay-Fleming and Albro agreed that violence and climate migration were connected, as farmers would first migrate to cities when crops failed, and then be driven north by a lack of opportunity and urban violence. This means they don't always mention environmental factors when asked their reasons for coming to the U.S.
Tanya Basu of The Daily Beast writes:
The climate change narrative dispels the popular notion that many migrants from the Northern Triangle are escaping gang violence and rampant drug wars. "The dominant discourse about unaccompanied minor migration has almost entirely been attributed to violence in the region," Carrie Seay-Fleming, a graduate student in the department of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, said. "But there isn't a whole lot of evidence that violence is [driving migration]."
Grouping Guatemalans with El Salvadorans and Hondurans is one of the biggest problems here, Seay-Fleming said. Studies have shown that Guatemalans—who she said compose the majority of migrants at the border right now—cite economic distress much more than drugs and violence, which Hondurans and El Salvadorans are more likely to point to as the push for their migration (though still at equal rates to economic distress).
snip
As people who live in the Northern Triangle have dealt with severe food insecurity over the last decade or so, families, desperate for cash and food, head to urban areas. These urban areas, in turn, become nightmarish, as families try to traverse not only a very different urban lifestyle but also the drug trade and gang violence that is often rampant in slums and within the city. That, in turn, often leads families to pack up and leave, first for perhaps another city, and when that doesn't work out, further north into another country—perhaps Mexico, then the United States.
snip
That multi-stage movement north means that when it comes time to classify what type of migrants these families are, they aren't seen as climate change refugees. "They cite other problems," Albro points out, like the violence and economic despair. Almost always, climate change slips their mind, even though many of them can trace the initial reason why they move to that. "One of the difficulties is that environmental triggers are typically not included as factors for migrants," he added.
People are migrating today due to Climate Change, and the removal of Trump and his henchmen is critical so that we can focus on how to handle the looming influx of desperate people based on science and sound government policies, not the racist rants of a murderous madman.
x xYouTube Video