THE RICKETY BAMBOO footbridge joining the lush green river banks that run through El Paraíso is washed away nearly every year by bloated waters during the storm season and rebuilt again by the villagers when the water levels subside.
Locals in the Honduran village have become accustomed to the yearly flooding of the ground floors of their brightly-coloured homes, and spending days or weeks cut-off from normal supplies, as the main vehicular bridge into the village lies submerged beneath several inches of water.
Jose Cardona, who leads the local emergency response committee in El Paraíso, says the number of hurricanes and serious storms his rural community has experienced has increased since when he was a child.
El Paraíso lies in La Lima in northwestern Honduras, one of the most climate vulnerable regions in the word where hurricanes, tropical storms, floods and droughts keep many families trapped in cycles of destruction, debt and poverty. In the last two decades, Honduras has suffered dozens of serious weather events – which are likely to increase, as the annual mean temperature in Honduras is set to rise by up to 2.5 degree Celsius by 2050.
Some villagers in El Paraíso are still paying off loans they took out for repairs and losses after storms Eta and Iota in November 2020, says Cardona. The consecutive storms impacted almost half of Hondurans, inflicting $2 billion dollars worth of damage on the impoverished country and pushing tens of thousands of desperate Hondurans to seek asylum in Mexico and march en-masse towards the US during 2021.
Every year, the economic impact of serious weather events is felt across Honduras, with the country losing an estimated 1.8 percent of its GDP every year. According to The World Bank, if climate change measures are not implemented, the Honduran economy will lose 5.4 percent of its GDP to floods, windstorms and earthquakes by 2050, leaving five million people living in poverty.
Despite the routine hardship during storm season, villagers in El Paraíso say they prefer to stay in their homes, rather than take shelter elsewhere during the annual storm season.
To better cope with the rainy period, the villagers have adapted: new houses in El Paraíso are built on stilts to reduce the damage from flooding, while to avoid electrocution, electrical sockets are installed high up on the walls – and hopefully many inches above the waterline during storm season. The municipality in La Lima responsible for El Paraíso also now has a system in place for supplying food and drinking water during emergencies, while the villagers are hoping for a new vehicular bridge that will be less likely to be submerged during the storm season.
Overall, the number of fatalities during storm season in Honduras has decreased dramatically in the last three decades, as Honduran communities have developed better protections and early warning systems that allow them to monitor water levels in rivers prone to flooding.
An estimated 11,000 people died during Hurricane Mitch in 1998, while 100 died during storms Eta and Iota in 2020. Lucas Savio Paz, 54, who lives in San Jose de Oriente, a mountainous farming hamlet outside of Santa Barbara, lost five family members during Storms Eta and Iota. “We live in fear here when it starts raining,” he says. “My wife won’t sleep and sometimes I have to take her to another house of neighbours who live in safer areas.”
Last November, the winds from Storm Sara reached 65 km per hour and unleashed flash flooding and mudslides across northeastern Honduras. While thousands were forced to evacuate their homes only six died and, to the relief of the communities there, no one in El Paraíso or San Jose de Oriente was among them.
Instead of relying on news reports, or being hit without warning by a flash flood, the communities in El Paraíso and San Jose de Oriente now have accurate information on the risk from rising water levels that can turn normally bucolic river bank areas and creeks along the Ulúa River into danger zones during the rainy period. The early warning system can provide an advance warning of six hours that allows locals to take shelter at home, or when it is necessary to evacuate to safety elsewhere in the event of hurricanes or serious storms.
Early warning systems are an important mechanism for climate vulnerable countries to adapt to the increasing frequency of extreme weather events. ECHO, the aid arm of the European Commision, is currently funding early warning systems in several climate vulnerable countries including Honduras, Guatemala and Pakistan.
In Honduras, ECHO has partnered with the Irish NGO Trócaire, which is working with the local Mennonite Social Action Commission, to help support an early warning system as part of a programme called “Trabajamos Juntos” (Let’s work together). Trócaire organised a media visit to several communities benefiting from the programme.
At bridges overlooking the Ulúa River and its off-shoots in the Sula Valley, solar-powered cameras and sensors have been installed which produce live video feeds and monitor traffic light coloured water lines to help locals see when they are facing a higher risk of flooding.
Yeimy Noemy Sagasfume is one of the students at the Independent Institute in Santa Barbara who has been involved in building one of the weather monitoring units for the early warning systems. “It was a huge responsibility but also a point of pride,” she says and hopes the project will be broadened.
The data and information from the cameras feed into a network which encompasses the national civil defense authority, regional municipality committees, and local emergency response teams made up of mostly volunteers that issue warnings through WhatsApp groups, by word of mouth and loud speakers when needed that tell locals when to evacuate or take shelter.
“It’s not just about the technology, it’s also about maintaining these teams and networks every year,” says George Redman, the country director for Trócaire in Honduras, while on a bridge overlooking a community living by the Chamelecón River whose homes were swept away in 2020.
Rafael Armando Rios Fernandez, a coordinator for the local Catholic church in San Jose de Oriente and part of the local emergency response team, says he feels much calmer during storm season since the early warning system has been put in place. “It’s a way for us to be alert, to be able to seize the magnitude of the possible damage and to let people know so that they can avoid it,” he says.
Poor governance increases Honduras’s vulnerability to extreme weather events and can impede the effectiveness of early warning systems. New dams which impact the flow of rivers and streams are often constructed in the Santa Barbara region without consulting local indigenous and farming communities living in the arable flatlands around the Ulúa River. The opening of new dams means the network of early warning systems must be carefully recalibrated to ensure the water level markers are still providing communities with reliable warnings.
While the early warning system helping communities in El Paraíso and San Jose de Oriente is funded by grants from the EU, much of the funds provided to climate vulnerable countries like Honduras will be in the form of loans, which form almost half of the total overseas development aid for developing nations in Latin America.
The EU allocated EUR 1.8 billion to its humanitarian aid budget in 2024. A quarter (EUR 470 million) was allocated “to address the extreme humanitarian needs of Gaza and the Palestinian civilian population” and also to meet the needs of ongoing crises in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen. Less than ten percent of the humanitarian aid budget (EUR 111.6 million) was allocated to Central and South America and the Caribbean, while the region attracts just four percent of EU development aid.
The EU’s new global investment and development strategy, the Global Gateway, prioritises loans which pay back debt and interest to European financial institutions over grants. The EU programme is rolling out projects in 29 of the world’s most indebted developing countries including in Honduras, where national debt is forecast to increase by 26.15 percent between 2024 and 2029.
The UN has criticised the move towards a model of providing loan-based “aid” at a time when developing nations are increasingly suffering from excessive levels of debt while simultaneously receiving less overall aid assistance. In a report published in June 2024, the UN Trade and Development Agency, said: “40% of the world’s population lives in developing nations where their governments are already forced to spend more on servicing debt than on investing in key development infrastructure such as healthcare or education.”
A report produced by Oxfam and Eurodad, a network of 28 EU NGOs, found that more than 60 percent of the Global Gateway projects analysed benefit European companies like Siemens or Suez. Martha Sanchez Gutierrez, Programs Director at Oxfam Central America criticised the EU’s Global Gateway’s approach towards Latin America, saying that it “risks syphoning resources from the Global South to pay for the EU´s so-called green transition. This comes at the expense of our communities. Latin America is the most unequal region in the world.”
Thousands of kilometres from decision-makers in Brussels and Washington DC, Savio Paz sits in front of his community hall in San Jose de Oriente at the end of the storm season in December. Nearby a team of men are working on converting the local Catholic church into a shelter to better protect the community for the next storm season.
Savio Paz says he will not move from his home to a city, where land is much more expensive. “But also another reason is that I was born here, and to me, this is the most beautiful town in the world,” he says. “By my own will, I would never leave. I was born here. I grew up here. I will die here.”
But for many Central Americans living in communities on the frontline of the climate crisis which are not being provided with money and support to adapt their livelihoods and protect their homes from extreme weather events, leaving can become the only solution.
Mariela Maldonado decided to try to migrate to the US in August 2021, after she lost everything she owned during the Eta and Iota storms and was then fired from her job. “I had no other option,” she says. “Unfortunately, in our country, if you are 30 years old, it’s difficult for you to find opportunities for work, and the first thing that comes to mind is to migrate, to leave to another country so that you can have better opportunities and help your family.”
After being smuggled to Mexico along a route where women routinely face sexual abuse, extortion and trafficking, Maldonado was detained by Mexico’s federal police force. She was held in “inhumane conditions” in a detention centre in Chiapas for five days, before being deported back to Honduras. Maldonado now lives in Choloma, a neighbourhood controlled by gangs in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras.
Michael Lenihan, the archbishop of San Pedro Sula, runs two shelters in his diocese for migrants who pass through the country on the way to Mexico and the US.
“If they come to us, it’s just for one night,” says Lenihan, who is originally from Limerick. “There’s a variety of migrants. Some of them are very, very poor and they have nothing. Others who have fled, they have some money enough to get through. But everybody needs a place to rest and good food and a place to wash themselves and then move on the next day,” says the Irish archbishop.
“But the volume of migrants coming in means we can’t take care of everybody.”
Hannah McCarthy is a journalist based in Beirut.
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