When the Waters Come

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Climate change allegedly has claimed many victims.

Temperatures as high as 117 degrees Fahrenheit were recently causing fatal heat strokes in Pakistan. The South Asian country is on track to warm by almost nine degrees Fahrenheit by the 2090s compared with the early 1980s. These deaths occurred after devastating floods in 2022 killed more than 1,730 people and wrecked two million homes, causing $30 billion in damage.

Natural disasters stemming from climate change especially harm so-called fragile states, or developing countries with corrupt and/or inefficient governments, like the Central African Republic, Somalia and Sudan, noted the International Monetary Fund. Women and girls are also among the hardest-hit victims, added UNICEF. Females comprise around 80 percent of those displaced in climactic events, too.

Climate change also impacts flora and fauna – affecting people’s lives. Consider how higher water temperatures threaten the Maine lobster industry. Permafrost in Siberia is thawing, challenging locals who are used to hard ground. Wildfires have ravaged Canada and parts of Europe.

Few examples of the toll that climate change is taking on people are more wrenching than the experience of the 1,200 residents of Carti Sugtupu, a tiny, densely populated island in Panama.

Inhabitants of Carti Sugtupu lived in dirt-floor houses nestled on the island that is as large as five football fields, wrote Agence France-Press. They lived off fishing, with “no drinking water, sanitation or reliable electricity.” A visual story in the Atlantic magazine provided stirring images of the fascinating Latin American island community.

However, more recently, the sea has been frequently flooding their homes, which are around three feet above sea level. As a result, authorities informed them that rising sea levels would make living there impossible by 2050, and that they would be provided with new homes in Nuevo Carti, a town on the Panamanian mainland.

The islanders didn’t want to go.

“We are sad because if this island disappears, a part of our heart, of our culture, disappears with it,” said Alberto Lopez, who was born on the island 72 years ago, in an interview with Business Insider. “My grandmother, my grandfather and my aunt died here … it’s not going to be the same, but I have to move on because life goes on.”

While these Panamanian islanders are the first in the country to be relocated because of the changing climate, they aren’t going to be the last in the region.

In southern Brazil, for example, Silvia and Vitor Titton surveyed the ruins of their neighborhood ravaged by flooding in Porto Alegre, and decided they had enough, it was time to move to another city. “No, I can’t do this,” she told the Washington Post of her decision to leave the area. “I can’t live with this fear of water, fear of rain.”