Renata Solan
Farmer Miguel Zúñiga discusses the impacts of heavy rains in his corn field near La Paz de Carazo, Nicaragua.
October in Nicaragua brings a creeping sense of anxiety. Over the last quarter century, it has become the country’s wettest month, as intense late rainy season deluges have increased in tandem with the temperature. These storms often lack names, so they don’t attract much media attention outside of Central America. But for a low-income family living next to a drainage ditch, or a person caught at the wrong time crossing an overflowing river, a low-pressure system magnified by the warming planet can be as catastrophic as a hurricane.
Twice in the past four years, October landslides have buried Nicaraguan families alive. Outbreaks of potentially deadly dengue fever and leptospirosis, likely associated with urban poverty, increasing temperatures, and these heavy rainfalls, are now almost annual events.
Flooding damages houses and roads in the capital city of Managua every year, and evacuees there regularly number in the thousands, as just happened this October. Beyond the sprawling capital, violent downpours also plague the countryside, where they threaten the livelihoods of the roughly 1.2 million Nicaraguans who work in agriculture. One quarter of them suffer chronic or temporary food insecurity. Small farmers rely on their crops not only for subsistence and income but for each year’s seeds, as well.
When I visited Miguel Zúñiga, a sixty-nine-year-old farmer, on his small, diversified farm in the department of Carazo in 2011, he told me climatic changes have resulted in year after year of failed crops. He was already suffering annual losses of red beans, a Nicaraguan staple. Since then, the trend of crop failures has continued. The strongest El Niño phenomenon ever recorded caused one of the most severe droughts in decades between 2014 and 2016. Then, 2017 brought repeated heavy rain and flooding events, including a deadly tropical storm.
“Before, we didn’t have so many losses,” Zúñiga told me. “Now, always, on a regular basis. If there aren’t floods, it’s because of droughts. I always lose [something].”
Which is why Zúñiga and other farmers—some of those hit hardest here at the epicenter for climate injustice—are doing something about it.
Increasingly frequent heavy rain events are combining with deforestation and urbanization to make all Nicaraguans more vulnerable to the loss of property and crops, displacement, disease, and death that flooding can provoke. This vulnerability compounds year after year, especially for those people without savings or insurance. As personal assets, health, livelihoods, and infrastructure are degraded, the resilience of families and communities least able to recover is sapped. In this way, the sum of small disasters mounts over years and generations.
This past October repeated the disastrous trends of recent decades. Low-pressure systems flanking both of Central America’s coasts led to at least fourteen deaths and the displacement of thousands of Nicaraguans. Even for those who escaped such fates, the floods drowned crops, caused gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses, and led to people missing work and school. Similar deluges in neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, and Costa Rica also claimed lives and pushed thousands out of their homes. All together, early October’s rains affected nearly 200,000 people in the region.
Central America is one of the world’s regions most impacted by the ever more volatile climate.
Though Central American migrants often make U.S. headlines, the media rarely mention that Central America is one of the world’s regions most impacted by the ever more volatile climate. Or that climate volatility contributes to migration. According to the Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index, between 1997 and 2016, Nicaragua and Honduras were among the five countries in the world most affected by extreme weather, which includes heat waves and droughts.
But these countries bear little responsibility for the forces driving climate volatility. Nicaragua, for example, accounts for only 0.03 percent of the world’s human greenhouse gas emissions. As of 2014, Nicaragua’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions were about 1/20th those of the United States. And most of Nicaragua’s emissions come from deforestation and land use change, as people try to make a living, not personal and industrial energy consumption, as in richer countries.
Yet farmers in places like Carazo are acutely aware of both the effects of felling trees and their disproportionate suffering from climate change. Over the past few decades, this agriculturally rich area has been gradually deforested, mostly through firewood consumption, urbanization, and conversion of coffee plantations and forests into pastures and row crops.
Between 2000 and 2017 alone, the department lost almost 5 percent of its tree cover. During the same period, the weather there has become generally hotter, punctuated with extreme rainfall events.
Carazo farmers such as Zúñiga “definitely see the problems in Nicaragua as a microcosm of what’s happening all over the world,” says Michael Boudreau, executive director of Compas de Nicaragua, a nonprofit group that supports reforestation and food security initiatives. (Full disclosure: I serve on Compas de Nicaragua’s board of directors and have volunteered with its projects since 2008.)
According to Boudreau, who has lived in Nicaragua for twenty years, “There’s no normal rainy season anymore.” Historically, farmers timed the planting of their crops with the onset of rain in early May, but now the rainy season often doesn’t start until June. And then the rains are more sporadic than they used to be, frequently damaging moisture-sensitive crops like red beans and corn.
As a result, “a lot of farmers are willing to do some reforestation on their land,” says Boudreau, “but they need to see that there may be some benefit.” So Compas de Nicaragua is collaborating with farmers to reforest using trees that also provide food and saleable commodities, such as moringa and maya nut trees grown with an understory of coffee and cacao.
Four years ago, Compas provided farmer Martín Flores of La Paz de Carazo with shade, fruit, and coffee trees to reforest about an acre of his land. The coffee provides about $300 a year, and the high-protein leaves and roots of moringa trees provide about $80 a year of additional income.
Fruit trees also give Flores a small income and a food source throughout the year. While these sums may seem meager to an outsider, to a small farmer in Nicaragua—who typically makes only about $100 a month—the added income is substantial. In addition, Flores attests, the tree cover has helped improve soil quality and moisture retention dramatically.
Flores and other farmers in Carazo recognize that reforestation is important, says Boudreau. “They feel like they’re doing something at least, chipping in the best they can.” But Boudreau has also heard them ask: “What’s happening in some of these wealthier nations. Are they doing their fair share as well?”
They’re right to wonder this. Not only do rich countries like the United States bear much more responsibility for the climate crisis, they have more capacity to deal with it. Recognizing this, poorer countries lobbied the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to create the Green Climate Fund (GCF) in 2010. The GCF is intended to be the most important source of funding for climate change mitigation and adaptation projects in so-called developing countries.
But the pledged $100 billion a year by 2020 for the GCF has yet to materialize. President Barack Obama contributed only $1 billion of a pledged $3 billion, and President Donald Trump eliminated all further U.S. contributions in 2017. Australia also recently announced that it will not increase funding to the GCF, and tensions over decision-making continue among the GCF’s board.
As of October, the GCF is administering almost 100 projects, including one throughout Central America that aims to give small farmers better credit access to implement climate change adaptation measures. But GCF’s start-up funding of $6.6 billion will soon be exhausted.
Community-based climate mitigation and adaptation initiatives provide crucial alternatives to the faltering Green Climate Fund and sometimes poorly executed government programs such as those of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
Another shining example of a community-based project in Nicaragua, Million Trees by 2020, is supported by the nonprofit organization Paso Pacífico. This project aims to restore tropical dry forest on the twelve-mile-wide, mountainous isthmus between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean in Nicaragua’s department of Rivas, which has lost 8.5 percent of its tree cover since 2000.
This region has also been recently devastated by annual climate shocks, from the 2015 drought that caused a mass die-off of primates, to the tropical storms of 2016 and 2017 that destroyed homes and swaths of remaining forest. One ninety-year-old local woman who has lived her entire life on the isthmus said she had never seen flooding there like the inundations of October 2017.
As a result, says Paso Pacífico’s Executive Director Sarah Otterstrom, “Communities are grasping the gravity of the situation with respect to climate and weather patterns becoming more intense and more destructive.”
Paso Pacífico’s approach to reforestation is multifaceted. Since 2007, the organization has worked with landowners and communities to plant native trees on farmland and pasture in the hills above Lake Nicaragua. These areas, says Otterstrom, “are completely forest now. If you went in there and you weren’t a biologist, you would say, ‘Wow, there’s a forest. It has all the wildlife. It has spider monkeys running around in the canopy.’ That’s in a decade. That’s one of the miraculous things about the tropics.”
These new forests don’t only benefit wildlife. One full-grown tree in this region can absorb up to forty-eight pounds of atmospheric carbon per year. This means the forests are helping counter the climate change-inducing carbon dioxide emissions of richer countries.
The forests are helping counter the climate change-inducing carbon dioxide emissions of richer countries. But it's not just about the carbon.
But, Otterstrom stresses, “it’s not just about the carbon. We’re essentially supporting landowners in building their assets on their landscape. That’s really exciting because they can then use those trees for firewood, or for food, or for timber, and at the same time they’re improving their watersheds and decreasing erosion.”
In the past five years, Paso Pacífico has employed local people in planting and monitoring 80,000 trees with seventy different small farmers, primarily in flood-prone riparian areas. Unlike many government reforestation efforts and internationally funded carbon sequestration projects, Paso Pacífico plants up to twenty different species of trees and cares for them for at least five years after they’re planted to reduce mortality. The trees create buffers from flooding, improve the land’s ability to absorb rain, and mitigate the increasing heat.
As one local farmer told Otterstrom, “It works. It makes things more fresco—cooler.”
Otterstrom says it’s unfortunate that such initiatives are not more prevalent, “because if we just went for massive, massive investment in tropical conservation and reforestation and community-based forest management—if that were truly a political priority—we could make a really significant dent in the climate change problem.”
The examples of Compas de Nicaragua and Paso Pacífico provide concrete ways of collaborating with communities most impacted by climate disruption, rather than imposing potential solutions on them. For many Nicaraguans and millions of other low-income people around the world, confronting climate volatility is one struggle among many other struggles for survival. The beauty of community-based solutions is that they unite these struggles.
In places like Carazo, where Miguel Zúñiga farms, survival still revolves around an optimism as old as agriculture. Reflecting on why he continues planting after years of climate-induced crop failures, Zúñiga remarked, “Someone says to me, ‘Why do you work if you lose?’ I tell them, ‘For the hope of harvesting.’”