Environment, poverty aggravate Latin America floods
Date: 21-Dec-99
Country: MEXICO
Author: Fiona Ortiz
The carnage and desperation are a grim replay of last year's Hurricane
Mitch, which drenched Nicaragua and Honduras, wiping out bridges, roads,
towns and plantations, causing $6 billion in damage and killing perhaps
9,000 people.
Disaster groups and environmentalists say that a dangerous cocktail of
environmental factors and poverty have made many areas in Latin America
disasters waiting to happen. Because of ripe conditions, death tolls are
worse than they have to be.
"Everyone is aware of the environmental problems of global warming and
deforestation on the one hand, and the social problems of increasing
poverty and growing shantytowns on the other. But when these two factors
collide, you have a new scale of catastrophe," Astrid Heiberg, President
of the International Federation of the Red Cross, said earlier this
year.
In an annual report, the Red Cross predicted more and worse crises in
Latin America, and worldwide, because of climate change and poverty.
Forecasts for more deadly and devastating natural disasters seem to be
coming true in Latin America.
Mitch was called one of the century's most deadly Atlantic storms and
the flooding was the worst of the century in Honduras.
Houses that had stood for 150 years in colonial towns were torn away by
raging rivers.
In Mexico two months ago, the strongest floods and landslides of many
decades melted hillsides and filled valleys with water in four eastern
states, killing about 400 people. A year earlier, catastrophic floods in
southern Mexico also killed hundreds.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Scientists are not in agreement whether temporary extreme weather
fluctuations such as El Nino and La Nina, or overall global warming -
blamed on emissions of greenhouse gases - are causing killer storms, but
experts in Latin America say higher temperatures have meant stronger and
more intense rains.
"In the Venezuelan case, you can clearly see a climate change over 50
years, that there are higher temperatures," said Julio Cesar Centeno, a
doctor in forestry and professor at the Universidad de los Andes in
Venezuela.
Ricardo Sanchez, director of the U.N. Environment Program's Latin
American region, told Reuters that recent disasters have claimed more
lives because of climate change.
"Even if all the evidence is not in yet, we are having a strong climate
change influence, which in our region is manifesting itself with an
increase in hurricanes and an increase in frequency and intensity of
rains ... which makes the impact more intense," Sanchez said.
DEFORESTATION
Centeno said the average annual deforestation in Venezuela over two
decades is 1.2 million acres (500,000 hectares), 1.1 percent a year,
twice as high as in Brazil.
Environmentalists say that a lack of forest cover means that rainfall
runs off hillsides faster, increasing erosion, which can lead to
flooding and mudslides.
Ed Harp, a geologist with the Central Geologic Hazards team of the U.S.
Geological Survey, told Reuters that while the link between
deforestation and landslides or flooding is not as dramatic as many
people suggest, "there is an effect, and I think sometimes it's fairly
marked."
Harp explained that heavy rainfall soaks through the soil, saturating it
completely and then pooling on the top of bedrock, destabilising entire
areas of topsoil until they slip away. A big slide can move down hill
rapidly, tearing away at other areas and gathering more material, moving
as far as 9 miles (15 kms).
Although landslides can occur in forested areas, forest cover could
prevent some landslides by absorbing moisture, he said.
POOR NEIGHBOURHOODS AFFECTED MORE
In Venezuela, Honduras and Mexico, while the floods did not spare the
rich, the precarious buildings of the poor, on steep cliffs or on flood
plains, suffered disproportionately.
"Many poor people live in areas that should not be inhabited and in
houses not designed to resist any unst