Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean are living a global-warming paradox. The region currently accounts for less than 1% of world greenhouse-gas emissions, yet is considered among the planet’s most vulnerable areas to the impacts of climate change. As delegates prepare for the next UN Climate Change Conference, scheduled for Nov. 6-18 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, Latin American experts feel particular urgency to step up climate-adaptation measures so these aren’t lost in the scramble to pursue mitigation actions.

“There used to be a sense that if we embraced climate adaptation, we were resigning ourselves to global warming, as if we had given up even trying,” says Tania Guillén, a Nicaraguan environmental engineer conducting research at the Climate Service Center in Germany (Gerics). “But climate adaptation measures are urgent; they cannot be put off until tomorrow.” Adds Guillén, who is helping to develop a framework for measuring the effectiveness of adaptation measures: “For too long, climate change has been spoken of as something that will happen in the future. Those of us familiar with the worst-affected regions, such as Central America and the Caribbean, know that change is fully upon us because of the seriousness and increased frequency of disasters.”

Central America and the Caribbean are already experiencing hurricanes of greater frequency and severity, deepening drought, and sea-level rise that has caused the loss of coastal land and worsened flooding. All of this has been predicted—most recently by the IPCC in 2021. (See "IPCC previews severe trends in store for region" —EcoAméricas, August 2021.) Central America—especially the so-called Northern Triangle formed by Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador—is considered highly vulnerable, sandwiched as it is between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Hurricanes striking the isthmus can draw moisture from two oceans at once, with devastating environmental and social results. This was illustrated in Nov. 2020, when hurricanes Eta and Iota together affected 3.5 million people in Honduras alone.

A key concern is that rising ocean temperatures boost humidity levels and thus the likelihood of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes. (See "Atlantic hurricane season could be busy, NOAA says" —EcoAméricas, June 2022.) The 2021 Atlantic Hurricane season was the sixth consecutive above-normal Atlantic hurricane season according to the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean Report, which was issued in July.

Sea-level rise represents a particularly dire threat to small island nations of the Caribbean. The WMO report says the trend is occurring in the region at a faster rate than globally. Along the subtropical North Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, the report says, sea levels rose 3.48 ± 0.1 millimeters annually from 1993 to 2021.

For island and mainland coastal communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, rising seas present a constellation of problems, including the fouling of freshwater aquifers, shoreline erosion and flooding, and increasingly destructive storm surges. The resulting hardship is compounded by existing socioeconomic vulnerability and by an ongoing lack of investment in shoring up natural defenses such as coastal wetlands and mangrove stands.

“The region’s governments direct less than 1% of their budgets towards the environmental sectors, which have traditionally received the smallest budgets,” says Guillén.

This leaves exposed populations in even greater peril, with people in the highest-risk zones in danger of losing their entire livelihoods in extreme weather events. The most vulnerable include Central America’s rural farmers, who have little access to the information, technology, and funding they need to adapt their age-old farming traditions to changing weather patterns and rebuild their lives in the event of natural disaster.

“Poverty, marginalization and low-quality housing increase vulnerability and make for a dangerous combination that feeds into migration trends,” Guillén observes.

According to the WMO report, “a total of 7.7 million people in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua experienced high levels of food insecurity in 2021, with contributing factors including continuing impacts from hurricanes Eta and Iota in late 2020.” Such weather confronts Central American countries, the Caribbean and Mexico with conditions they did relatively little to create, yet must take on debt to address. Nicaraguan officials say the impact of Eta and Iota in their country added up to US$742 million, the equivalent of 5.9% of the nation’s gross domestic product.

As climate change weighs more heavily, experts are working to develop a more sophisticated understanding of its specific impacts. Among them is Adelle Thomas, a Washington, D.C.-based senior Caribbean research associate for Climate Analytics, a nonprofit headquartered in Berlin. Thomas points to interlocking effects that she calls the “un-virtuous cycle” of loss and damage.

“An extreme event causes damage, and national resources are used to respond, pushing the nation further into debt, [and] reducing the resources available for sustainable development,” she says. “[T]he nation becomes more vulnerable, while at the same time GDP falls, the nation spirals further into debt, and then capital becomes harder to access.”

Thomas believes humanitarian aid is failing to meet needs because it often comes in the form of loans, which places the onus on vulnerable countries to bear financial responsibility for a global problem. Some countries do not qualify for such aid because—regardless of their vulnerability to climate change—their per-capita GDP is deemed too high. Such is the case with the Bahamas, which is still reeling from storms including Hurricane Dorian in Sept. 2019, Hurricane Isaias in July 2020, and seven hurricanes in 2021 alone, four of them major.

Advocacy groups are pressing the UN General Assembly to facilitate access to disaster-response concessional loans and grants that are not tied to a country’s per capita GDP. Current aid policy, they argue, fails to address the long-term needs imposed by disasters, such as rebuilding housing for those left homeless. All the while, they point out, the gap between available natural-disaster recovery funding and needs has widened exponentially.

Some point to insurance as a solution. But Thomas says her research suggests insurance is a very limited adaptation strategy, given its high price, insufficient claims payments and outright unavailability in zones of higher risk. Adaptation, she argues, must be addressed energetically and now.

Guillén agrees. “The region is an example of the urgent need for adaptation measures to be given equal priority as mitigation,” she says. “We cannot look at adaptation as something for the future. It should be on today’s agenda, and international funding priorities need to reflect that.”

Many experts argue adaptation should receive a greater share of international climate funding, pointing out that mitigation currently accounts for an estimated 70% of climate funding worldwide, while funding for adaptation is believed to be in the range of 5% to 25%. “Unfortunately, the focus has been on mitigation because it is a moneymaking opportunity to bring in renewable energy companies,” says Thomas. “Touting the benefits of solar panels totally fails to understand the needs of the most vulnerable, whose precarious situation means their homes can be wiped out at any point.”

Guillén stresses that while adaptation efforts must be brought level, this must occur in the context of strong sustainable-development policies. “As long as fossil-fuels investment continues to far outweigh investment in mitigation and adaptation, then we are not investing in the future,” she says, “we are just building vulnerability upon a foundation of vulnerability.”

Experts point out that comprehensive approaches will be hard to organize if, as is the case in much of the region, planning climate-informed spending falls to a single agency—typically the environment ministry. Instead, they say, it should become a common responsibility of all areas of government. “The region is in a very ambivalent phase,” says Avelina Ruiz, climate change manager in the Mexican office of the World Resources Institute (WRI), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “There is a lot of information and evidence about climate change, but it is not reflected in the region’s actions, planning or financing, which leaves us in a very dangerous position.”

Costa Rica, however, appears to be an exception. In April 2022, it announced a National Climate Adaptation Plan. According to the country’s treasury, costs for repairing and rebuilding after natural disasters could reach 2.5% of annual GDP, compared to 1% in 2010. “Private sector losses might also be colossal, collapsing value chains and production systems,” says former Costa Rican Environment and Energy Minister Andrea Meza Murillo. “We still have time to deal with the multiple factors, but we must take urgent action.”

Costa Rica’s 2022-26 adaptation plan, now formally in effect, calls for, among other things, adaptation-research investment; adaptation-strategy curricula at all levels of education; legislation requiring climate-resilient infrastructure; and adaptation steps to ensure food security and biodiversity protection. The plan will be carried out with public and private funding and in collaboration with the nonprofit sector.

With 80% of Latin America’s population living in cities, calls are mounting to address climate-related urban problems such as “heat islands”—temperature increases that occur when urban hardscapes absorb and re-emit solar heat—and the elevated death rates they cause.

Using the northern Mexican city of Monterrey as a case study, WRI Mexico is developing ways these problems can be addressed over the next decade. Based on the results of efforts tested in Monterrey, it is recommending strategies for other Mexican cities. Mexico’s second largest city, Monterrey has lost 38.6% of its porous ground in the last 20 years, compared to an average loss of 21.1% for Mexican cities overall. This hardscape expansion, combined with Monterrey’s average temperature rise of 0.2°C per decade from 1991 to 2021 has made the city an archipelago of heat islands.

WRI Mexico is working with Monterrey’s Urban Development Secretariat to identify the worst heat islands using satellite monitoring of surface temperatures. A mix of mitigation and adaptation strategies is being proposed to address them. Green areas—and recommendations regarding their number, quality and distribution—are expected to loom large in these strategies. WRI has found that when it comes to countering heat islands, smaller, well-distributed green areas with high-quality biodiversity are more effective than one large green area.

The think tank also favors tighter control of urban expansion, protection of existing natural parks and regeneration of green areas. WRI’s Ruiz, formerly a climate-change and urban-resilience expert at the Inter-American Development Bank, says resilience-infrastructure investment in such areas as communications, energy and sanitation can avoid losses some five times the value of the initial investment.

“If the region factored mitigation and adaptation measures into their infrastructure projects, it should not be necessary to increase the spending,” she says. “However, the problem is that most of the region’s development plans still do not include mitigation and adaptation.”

Installation of infrastructure can have unintended and unwanted consequences, as in the case of a dam that boosts local water supply but causes shortages downstream. Citing such concerns, many experts advocate “no-regrets” nature-based solutions that have few downsides while yielding manifold benefits. These, for instance, might include inland-headwaters reforestation or restoring mangrove ecosystems in coastal regions, which improves natural flood control while increasing carbon capture.

WRI is engaged in one such project along Mexico’s portion of the Gulf of Mexico in partnership with the Ocean Foundation and under the supervision of the country’s National Institute for Ecology and Climate Change (Inecc). Mexico, whose mangrove forests rank among the four most extensive in the world, has allowed tourism, aquaculture and conventional farming to displace this habitat over the decades. WRI Mexico developed a cost-benefit analysis for mangrove conservation in Tuxpan, Veracruz, as part of a project to accelerate implementation of adaptation measures called for in the voluntary greenhouse-gas-reduction commitments Mexico has made under the Paris Agreement.

Mangroves do not only protect the coast from hurricanes and land degradation; they also filter water, act as highly efficient carbon sinks and are among the most productive marine ecosystems. (See "Cuba to bolster mangroves for coastal protection" —EcoAméricas, April 2021.)

Average values of cost and benefit were calculated for four services associated with Tuxpan’s mangrove ecosystem—coastal protection, timber, fishery resources, and recreation. The study concluded that for each Mexican peso invested in conservation, the net economic benefit obtained would be 1.91 pesos.

“The economic valuation of eco-systemic services is one way to include the importance of the ecosystems in decision making processes,” a WRI summary of the project says. “This valuation seeks to assign a standardized monetary measure for the benefits generated by ecosystems, without turning them into a commodity.”