Last Hope USA? Climate Damage is Driving People in Central America to Flee

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from Central America make the arduous journey north to the USA. Hardly any of them have an entry permit. The reasons for their flight are manifold: poverty, corruption, violence, drug mafias. A study by the Universidad Rafael Landívar (URL) in Guatemala, funded by the Civil Peace Service (ZFD), shows that people are also increasingly fleeing the consequences of climate change – if they can afford it (1).

Many of those affected do not have the means to go elsewhere, explains researcher Ana Eugenia Paredes from URL. They are simply too poor and therefore forced to stay where torrential rains, floods and excessive droughts take turns and destroy people's livelihoods.

Migration researcher Ursula Roldán from the same university believes that Donald Trump's re-election as US president is likely to accelerate illegal migration in the short term. Many will try their luck before the wall is completely closed and the prices for people traffickers skyrocket. Trump's announcement of mass deportations of undocumented people from the USA is considered costly and difficult to implement. It is unclear whether they will have a deterrent effect. Even during Trump's first term in office, the flow of refugees hardly stopped, despite stricter controls and inhumane treatment – such as the separation of children from their families.

Meanwhile, the planned withdrawal of the USA from the Paris Climate Agreement does not bode well for living conditions in Central America. It’s most likely to lead to an increase in the flow of refugees.

Crop failures and flooding

“The harvest is failing this year,” complains farmer Neftali Lorenzo in Guatemala's so-called dry corridor. Instead of the usual rain in May, it only started in June and then only sporadically but heavily. The short dry period in August lasted too long and was too hot with temperatures well over 40 degrees. The result: no corn, no beans!

Neftali, who is in his mid-sixties, lives with his wife and two sons in El Arenal Cabañas – or rather, what is left of the community not far from the town of Zacapa. Four years ago, Neftali's wife Reinalda explains, the river swelled so much that it flooded the family home on the embankment with mud and debris. “Year after year, the Rio San Vicente widened during the rainy season and came closer to the 200 houses.” The family and other residents managed to reach safety in the nearby hills in time. However, almost all the villagers had to leave their homes, seek shelter with relatives and friends – or move far away.

Displacement and migration due to climate change?

Gilma Cabrera's underage son saw no other alternative but to emigrate to the USA – without papers, of course. A brother and a sister followed him, also illegally. Now Gilma lives with her youngest daughter, three grandchildren and her 80-year-old father up on the mountain next to the new school. She finances her new home mainly with remittances from her children who work illegally. However, they first had to pay around 20'000 dollars per person to the traffickers before they could send money home.

Neftali Lorenzo, too, was also able to build a new home for his family thanks to his savings. He had left them behind twice, each time for five years, to work as a roofer, construction and agricultural worker in the USA. “I took the jobs that came up,” he says. “Mojado” - ‘wet’ - is how he got into the USA. This is what Guatemalans call illegal migrants because they usually have to cross the Rio Grande along the Mexican-American border.

The state does too little

Neftali, Gilma and other villagers such as Gilberto Salazar may have lost their homes, but not their hope and courage – and their willingness to raise their voices. There is too little help from the state, the vice-chairman of the community development council COCODE complains, even if he has to admit that he can currently drive up the hill on a road that has just been tarred by the government.

In principle, there are two problems, as became clear at a seminar organized by URL and attended by government disaster relief workers, representatives of ministries and NGOs: On the one hand, there is a lack of (state) resources and clear environmental regulations and, on the other, a lack of coordination. Responsibilities are poorly regulated, as the university experts established in project studies. In one bizarre case, an inaccessible village without its own water supply, when faced with a crisis, was given a fish tank by an NGO in order to breed tilapia fish on the mountain.

At least the inhabitants of El Arenal Cabañas are learning from their mistakes, pointing to their own responsibility for the uncontrolled deforestation in the area. Massive deforestation many kilometers upstream in El Barrial has meant that rainwater is no longer retained in the soil. Instead, it flowed down the slopes in torrents, carrying mud and debris with it, causing the Rio San Diego and Santo Tomas rivers to swell enormously ahead of their confluence and then inundating El Arenal.

The consequences have also been felt in El Barrial itself: In the community of Chicimula, 172 families have had to leave their homes in recent years and months, reports Walter Felipe Espinosa. The agricultural scientist works for the Ministry of Agriculture in the region and cooperates with the national Coordinating Agency for Disaster Reduction. The agency recorded 290’000 cases of forced displacement nationwide due to climate events between 2008 and 2022. Of course, this is likely to be just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, when it rains, countless pools of water are turning into breeding ponds for tiger mosquitoes. In El Arenal, as in Guatemala and neighboring Honduras in general, dengue fever is on the rise. Last year, according to the experts on tropical medicine, over 72’000 cases were reported, i.e. 396 per 100’000 inhabitants. Since the beginning of this year, the incidence has more than doubled. For URL-climate researcher Gloria Garcia, this, too, an undeniable consequence of climate change.

Not the polluter, but the victim

Guatemala and its neighbor Honduras only emit 1.08 and 1.07 tons of CO2 per capita respectively – just over a fifth of the global average, a tenth of German and a thirteenth of US emissions. However, both countries suffer particularly badly from the consequences of global climate change. The World Meteorological Organization has recorded a temperature increase of up to one degree Centrigradae compared to the period 1981 to 2010. While this appears to be a comparatively mild upward trend, in 2020, an average increase of 1.71 degrees compared to 60 years ago was recorded.

Guatemala and Honduras lie between two oceans. While temperature fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean trigger the weather phenomena El niño (when the water surface warms up) and La niña (cooling), even a slight rise in temperature in the hurricane hotbed of the Caribbean causes more storms and extreme weather conditions. The result: more irregular and heavier rainfall, longer periods of drought.

URL-climate researcher Gloria Garcia in Guatemala describes Hurricane Mitch in 1998 as a turning point. Since then, exceptional weather phenomena have become more frequent. A rise in sea levels has also been observed, both on the Pacific and on the Caribbean coast, particularly in Honduras. Monocultures such as shrimp farming, especially on the Pacific coast of both countries, are not much of a help. Because of them, mangroves, a natural protective barrier, have disappeared in many places.

No Future – flight to the USA

On the Caribbean coast near Puerto Cortes in Honduras, the pounding ocean has reduced beaches to narrow, rubbish-strewn strips in many places. The Garífuna, descendants of escaped black slaves and indigenous people in Baja Mar and Travesia, make their living primarily from fishing and tourism. But who wants to relax on a garbage-strewn beach? The Garífuna region lies between the mouths of the Ulúa and Chamelecón rivers which wash up everything that less environmentally conscious Hondurans dispose of upstream.

As a result, fishing and tourism are suffering and living conditions are deteriorating. Young people are leaving their homeland for the USA. “Our school classes have shrunk by 70 to 80 percent. Some are leaving without a peso in their pockets,” Arnol Lopez, chairman of the Travesia local council, says with resignation in his voice. Nevertheless, he can also point to some achievements: It is thanks to his initiative that the road to and from Puerto Cortes, probably the most important port in Honduras, is finally being paved.

Environmental awareness? No way.

Dealing with waste, especially plastic waste, would be a starting point for solving at least part of the problem in Honduras. Also useful would be the construction of canals and retention basins to better control the flow of rivers, especially the Ulúa. Constant flooding is one reason why major US banana exporters have pulled out.

In 2020, two extremely destructive hurricanes, Eta and Iota, of magnitude 4 and 5 respectively, swept across Central America, with far-reaching consequences. The settlement of Lima, not far from Honduras' second largest city San Pedro de Sula, was completely flooded, the water level reaching several meters high. “I lost everything back then,” says Nicolas Gutierrez, who now keeps going by doing odd jobs. Fortunately, very few people paid for the disaster with their lives, but 5,000 families in Lima were left with nothing.

A total of 189 people died in the affected areas of Central America at the time, over 400’000 people sought refuge in emergency shelters and around 225’000 people in need were not reached by humanitarian aid for weeks.

There have been no new hurricanes in the region since then. However, climate researchers in Guatemala and Honduras believe that the trend is unmistakable. The number of smaller tropical storms with sometimes torrential rainfall has increased significantly, periods of drought, primarily in the dry corridor, are more pronounced, rainy seasons are shifting and rainfall is more irregular and concentrated.

Mitigating climate effects fails due to lack of money

The Valle de Sula in north-eastern Honduras is regularly flooded when the Ulúa swells as a result of torrential rainfall. Climate change is increasingly affecting two million people living in the river basin. However, they are not completely powerless, says Edwin Hernández from the ERIC research institute in El Progreso. He lists five concrete starting points:

1. dredging rivers and strengthening and repairing embankments;
2. expanding and repairing sewerage and irrigation system once set up by banana exporters, but which now lies largely unused following their withdrawal;
3. adapting infrastructure, for instance by building new houses on stilts;
4. construction of dams upstream as retention basins, which could also be used to generate energy and provide water for irrigation; and
5. reforestation in higher-lying areas.

So much for the theory. In practice, there is usually a lack of political will, but above all a lack of money. Honduras – like its neighbor Guatemala – has been ruled for decades by a highly corrupt, some even claim mafia-like elite. Income distribution is among the most unequal in the whole of Latin America (Gini coefficient of 48.2 for Honduras and 48.3 for Guatemala). However, as long as the upper class does not suffer, there is no incentive to finance environmental, infrastructure and social programs through higher taxes.

Both countries are dependent on external aid. In theory, it sounds like a good idea to improve living conditions so that people do not become illegal migrants: after all, 300’000 to 400’000 people from Central America make their way to the USA every year – without papers. However, only fractions of the billions announced by the USA are actually made available. The three countries of the northern triangle “Triangulo Norte”, which includes El Salvador as well as Guatemala and Honduras, are expected to receive around 600 million dollars per year – calculated across all ministries as well as US AID. This is nowhere near enough to improve living conditions in the countries so that people stay, especially as the situation is worsening due to climate change.

Migration researchers in Guatemala and Honduras have therefore long been calling for climate change to be included as a motive for flight in the Geneva Refugee Convention. According to World Bank estimates, by 2050 there will be 17 million climate refugees within and from Latin America. With massive investment in sustainable development and the environment, this figure could be reduced to just 5.8 million.

With Donald Trump taking office, the more pessimistic scenario is probably the more realistic one. What's more, should Trump actually go ahead with his planned mass deportations, this would deal a fatal blow to the economies of Central America. Two million Guatemalans and one million Hondurans, a tenth of the population in each case, live in the USA, mostly illegally, according to URL research. In 2023, they transferred almost 20 billion dollars to Guatemala and more than 9 billion dollars to Honduras: in the case of Guatemala, this corresponds to 20 percent of the gross national product, and 28 percent for Honduras.

Instead of sending home illegal workers, who are also important for the US economy, the USA should rather invest more in improving living conditions in Central America. 13.5 million undocumented people live in the USA, the vast majority from Latin America. Three quarters work, pay taxes and social security contributions without benefiting from the latter. Migration experts in the USA have calculated that the annual deportation of one million undocumented migrants alone could cost up to 88 billion dollars.

The question arises as to where and how the money would be better invested.