By Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos
No one on the Colombian island of Providencia was prepared for what happened on the night of Nov. 16, 2020. Not even Josefina Huffington, who had survived four hurricanes. That evening, as she waited for the storm to pass by playing parchisi with her son, a tree, lifted by winds as fast as 305 kilometers per hour (190 miles per hour), smashed against her window.
“This is it,” she recalls telling him as she saw the roof fly away. They survived the storm, but their 1,700-hectare (4,200-acre) island, part of the San Andrés Archipelago, was turned into rubble.
“The color of everything changed, everything was black, ” Huffington says. “The entire island looked as if it was set on fire.”
Hurricane Iota destroyed around 2,000 homes in Providencia, which has a population of roughly 4,600. Hospitals, schools and churches were flattened by the category 4 hurricane. Nothing was left. This might not be a singular event; research has shown that climate change could bring more intense extreme weather in the region. As some scientists fear a change in hurricane behavior, communities across the more than 700 islands in the Caribbean Sea are increasingly vulnerable to their impacts.
Before the hurricane, houses in Providencia differed in size and color. Now, they all look alike: blue, yellow, green, or purple walls and white roofs. Image courtesy of Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos.
After the disaster, Colombian authorities sent help to Providencia; by the end of 2022, two years after Iota, almost every house was rebuilt. But the reconstruction process was far from over. From the disaster’s aftermath, locals felt they were not part of the decision-making process. A month after the storm struck, Huffington filed a lawsuit against the Colombian government, arguing that officials were leaving them out of the reconstruction and rebuilding their homes with deficient materials that offered no real protection against future storms. The country had spent around $141 million to rebuild, but locals frequently complain about rotten decks, ineffective cisterns, and leaking ceilings and septic tanks.
Fighting to have a voice
Huffington, who leads the Movement of Civic Surveillance of Old Providence (Movimiento de Veeduría Cívica de Old Providence), says she’s never trusted the Colombian government. According to her, the defective tents offered to locals after the disaster and the officials’ attitude were early evidence that they were going to exclude the residents from the entire reconstruction process.
“We know that, for the rest of our lives, we are now vulnerable to climate change,” Huffington says. “That was one of the reasons we decided to sue.”
Besides fighting for her community’s rights and leading the Movimiento de Veeduría Cívica de Old Providence, Josefina Huffington owns and hosts a restaurant in Fresh Water Bay. Her specialties are fried fish, garlic lobster, crab stew, snail salad, and shellfish cazuelas. Image courtesy of Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos.
Her main argument was that Providencia is the native territory of the Raizal, one of Colombia’s four ethnic communities, and, as such, they have power and control over their territory. A Raizal herself, she said the national government was violating fundamental Raizal rights not only to adequate housing, potable water, basic sanitation, health and access to public records, but to a prior consultation: the right that Colombian law affords to ethnic communities to decide on any project that affects their territories.
Two local courts dismissed her lawsuit, arguing that the government’s response was adequate, given the health emergency and the need to guarantee human rights, and didn’t violate Raizal rights.
Huffington appealed to Colombia’s Constitutional Court, which decided to study the case in August 2021.
By then, the community’s problems had deepened. First, the materials used to build the new homes were problematic. “We are accustomed to building with high-quality wood, not soft materials,” Édgar Jay Stephens, a local fisherman and coordinator of the Federation of Artisanal Fishermen of Providencia (I-Fish), tells Mongabay. “The wood we imported was brought from the United States and Central America.” In Huffington’s case, this softer wood has already rotten twice since then.
Zully Archbold, who has worked with Huffington, says her father’s deck didn’t even last a year, “because they built with bad, cheap materials.”
In less than two years, the wood of Josefina Huffington’s house in South West Bay has already rotten twice. Image courtesy of Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos.
Septic tanks and new water tanks also created issues. Some of the tanks leaked, contaminating patios. In a response to the Constitutional Court, the Ministry of the Interior said it had found 91 houses with leaking tanks.
Locals complained that the water tanks the government installed were the wrong design for Providencia. Communities already knew how best to store water during the long dry seasons, using concrete tanks connected through pipes to the ceiling, allowing them to be filled during the rainy season. These tanks were so crucial that some used them as a refuge during the hurricane. The government didn’t include such designs in the reconstruction project, however, and even demolished some of the surviving tanks to clean the terrain for new houses, replacing them with plastic tanks. According to Huffington, this worsened the island’s decades-long water crisis.
Before Iota, most houses in Providencia had what locals know as bunkers or safe zones: a room in the house, a bathroom or a bedroom, with concrete walls that could endure the strongest storms. During the hurricane, most of the locals found refuge there. But when the government came to remove the debris, they tore down some of the bunkers and didn’t rebuild them.
In October 2022, the Constitutional Court agreed with Huffington’s claims. It concluded that the government had disregarded the locals, affecting “their traditions and their cultural, social, and economic practices.” To the court, the government’s approach to rebuilding Providencia was “unilateral, arbitrary, and focused on results.” It also didn’t consider “the need to build houses that could resist the effects of climate change,” violating international agreements, such as the Sendai Framework, which focuses on risk reduction, and the Paris Agreement, under which Colombia agreed to adapt its infrastructure to climate change. The decision forced the government to meet with the communities and discuss their housing issues.
Providencia faces a more extreme future
“Caribbean communities are going to be more vulnerable to the rising temperatures and the augmenting evaporation rate that is making rainfall more unpredictable and hurricanes stronger,” Sandra Vilardy, an ecologist and environmental expert who has studied Colombia’s Caribbean region, tells Mongabay.
An unprecedented rise in sea level in the last 50 years and predictions of more rainfall due to the increasing moisture in the atmosphere are likely to cause more floods during hurricanes, research has shown. Some studies indicate that these storms have become more intense, with category 2 or 3 incidents turning into category 3 or 4 disasters more quickly than they used to. There’s also a growing fear in the scientific community that intensification rates might keep increasing with climate change.
From the highest point in Providencia, you can see the third-largest barrier reef in the world, which protects the island’s eastern side from tropical storms. Image courtesy of Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos.
Climate change might also affect one of Providencia’s most effective defenses against storms: its coral reefs.
From Zully Archbold’s porch, looking beyond the pile of hurricane rubble the government left in front of her house, a line of white foam marks where the sea crashes into the third-largest barrier reef in the world. Providencia is walled by 32 km (20 mi) of corals that host nearly 500 species of fish, and which provide protection against storms. But as the ocean absorbs more CO2 from the atmosphere, it becomes more acidic, weakening reefs around the world, including the reef shielding Providencia.
“Without the coral reef, Providencia not only loses food security, but also its physical security,” Vilardy tells Mongabay. “The coral reef protected the eastern part of the island during Iota and reduced the damage in that area.”
Providencia is not alone; other islands in the Caribbean face an increasingly extreme climate. After hurricanes Maria and Irma in 2017, many Puerto Ricans abandoned their homes. A 2020 study by the U.S. Census Bureau found that more than 123,000 people left the island after the disaster.
But Puerto Rico’s story offers an alternative. Amid the most prolonged blackout in U.S. history and frequent power shortages, one town had electricity when almost everyone else didn’t.
In the mountainside town of Adjuntas, one local organization, Casa Pueblo, had installed solar panels with its own resources. “Thanks to Casa Pueblo, people in Adjuntas were able to keep food in refrigerators. They were able to help people who needed special medical equipment for different conditions when no one else could,” says Danielle Zoe Rivera, an urban planning and environmental and climate justice assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied Puerto Rico’s recovery.
Providencia remains a telltale for other islands in the Caribbean that are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather events. Image courtesy of Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos.
“We’ve learned that when governments set the agenda, they make mistakes because, even with the best intentions, they can’t think locally. They are always thinking country-wise,” says Arturo Massol Deyá, executive director of Casa Pueblo. “We, the ones that know the territory, can be more efficient in rebuilding and administrating aid.”
In Providencia, the relationship between the Raizal and Colombian authorities improved since Gustavo Petro became the country’s first-ever left-wing president, in 2022. His new government supports the prior consultation.
“The court was right in its decision,” says Álvaro Echeverry Londoño, director of prior consultations at the Ministry of the Interior. “We need to reach an agreement with the people of Providencia to finish and fix what was left unfinished, according to their traditional customs.”
After three months of meetings, in May 2023, Providencia’s Raizal residents abandoned the prior consultation process, deeming it useless. Some agencies never showed up, and those who did sent officials without decision-making power. “There was no political will to hear us,” Archbold says.
Since then, Echeverry says, the Ministry of the Interior has worked to coordinate the different agencies to send appropriate officials to the talks. Negotiations restarted in August 2023 and, since then, the government and Raizal have agreed on a schedule to discuss the 14 topics that need to be addressed, including environmental, housing and health issues, among others.
“We’re not asking for something new,” Archbold says. “Since the beginning, we told them what we needed, and they didn’t hear us. If they had listened to us, we would be in a whole different situation.”
Citations:
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Grinsted, A., Moore, J. C., & Jevrejeva, S. (2013). Projected Atlantic hurricane surge threat from rising temperatures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(14), 5369-5373. doi:10.1073/pnas.1209980110
Guzman, O., & Jiang, H. (2021). Global increase in tropical cyclone rain rate. Nature Communications, 12(1), 5344. doi:10.1038/s41467-021-25685-2
Bhatia, K. T., Vecchi, G. A., Knutson, T. R., Murakami, H., Kossin, J., Dixon, K. W., & Whitlock, C. E. (2019). Recent increases in tropical cyclone intensification rates. Nature Communications, 10(1), 635. doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08471-z
Li, Y., Tang, Y., Wang, S., Toumi, R., Song, X., & Wang, Q. (2023). Recent increases in tropical cyclone rapid intensification events in global offshore regions. Nature Communications, 14(1), 5167. doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40605-2
Banner image: Image by Juan Pablo Pérez Burgos.
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This article was originally published on Mongabay
