HAULOVER, Nicaragua – When the leaders of an indigenous Miskito town returned to their homes days after Hurricane Iota struck in November last year, they destroyed their lush community in northeastern Nicaragua – and the coastline itself alter.
Their colorful, perfect homes were cut down with post canopies, and the beaches with coconut trees devastated. The surrounding mangrove forests that protected and nourished the town, known as Haulover, were battered and broken. Drinking water wells are contaminated with salt water.
And a wedge of the ocean on the width of a soccer field now cuts through the center of the city, leaving villagers with a terrifying question: Stay and rebuild, or relocate the interior?
“I never thought about getting into the community and finding no reference points,” said Marcos Williamson, an ecologist at the Regional Autonomous University in Puerto Cabezas, who leads the environmental assessment. “It was as if a bomb had gone off that the community had virtually disappeared.”
Hurricane Iota, the most powerful hurricane of the Atlantic season for the record-setting 2020, sank directly on the impoverished northeast coast on November 16, forcing thousands to evacuate.
More than two months later, Haulover’s roughly 300 families were divided over rebuilding on the same vulnerable coastline or moving inland a few miles, behind natural barriers protected from a storm surge.
About 60 families have decided to relocate inland, but it will likely have to adopt farming practices – a complicated transition for an indigenous people with a strong dependence on the sea.
Despite the growing dangers posed by climate change, many Haulover residents are reluctant to seek higher ground.
“People from here continue to prefer to stay here,” said Jomary Budier, a lifelong resident. “If they want to take us somewhere far from the sea, they will not go.”
It’s a decision no one wants to make.
For many of the Miskito, moving back inland means not only partially abandoning their livelihoods – fishing for snapper in the sea, bark and shrimp in the lagoon – but also leaving behind the resting place of their ancestors.
One day in late December, María Pereira watched a group of men turn her father’s manger to the right. Hurricane Iota scattered some of its bones in the mangrove trees.
“We are looking for the remains of my father, who passed away four years ago,” she said. Periera said. “We feel that his soul is lost, that he continues to search for his resting place.”
Iota, which reached sustained winds of 160 miles per hour, was by far the strongest November hurricane recorded. It surpassed Hurricane Eta, which had hit Haulover and the same area off Nicaragua’s coast just two weeks earlier.
The two hurricanes displaced tens of thousands of people in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, killing about 200 people.
While no one died in the storms off the coast of Haulover, few communities suffered such total devastation and degradation in the area.
Mr. Williamson, the ecologist, is concerned that the twin hurricanes could possibly be a harbinger of future things. He recommends a higher domestic location. The original Haulover, located on a narrow strip of sand between the ocean and a brackish lagoon, no longer looks sustainable.
“Climate change affects everyone, but it does not affect us all equally,” Williamson said. ‘The poor communities, those who are isolated, are the ones we see, are ultimately most affected by climate change. The thing that worries me is that the world is not becoming aware of this. ”