CLIMATE REFUGEES
Wildfires force climate migrants to flee in world's richest country
Jennifer Cashman holds photos of before and after the fire that destroyed her former home Paradise, California, on the front porch of her new rental home in Stowe, Vermont JOSEPH PREZIOSO AFP
Issued on: 26/10/2021
Stowe (United States) (AFP)
They moved 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) to a new life in Vermont on the other side of the United States, far from the annual danger of fast-moving fires worsened by climate change.
"Our house and our business were completely gone. And it happened so fast, that we weren't able to really get anything out of the house except for ourselves," Cashman said.
"We had a suitcase each. That's all we had to our name."
The fire that tore through Paradise in 2018 killed 86 people and ruined nearly 19,000 buildings in just one day.
On the advice of a friend, the Cashman family went to visit Stowe, a small town in Vermont, and moved there with the help of insurance money in January 2019.
"We knew when the fire came that we were done; I could not live in California anymore," the 47-year-old said.
Jennifer and Ryan Cashman walk with their children, Morgan and Brady, and their dog Nova in Vermont
JOSEPH PREZIOSO AFP
Repeated evacuations had left their scars.
"It was the fear of every time you smell smoke. Are we going to be OK? And having my son scared even if you lit a fire in the fireplace; he was afraid of it," said Cashman.
"You know, the whole family's in therapy right now to deal with the trauma. My daughter suffers from really bad nightmares."
Flammable forests
Eight of the 10 largest fires ever recorded in California have occurred since 2017, as a punishing drought, sparked by human-caused global warming, leaves forests dry and flammable.
California, once a dream destination for millions and home to the world's fifth-largest economy, now faces climate migration -- a phenomenon previously only associated with poor, low-lying Pacific atolls threatened by rising seas or with arid areas in developing countries.
Abandoned and burned-out vehicles sit at a car lot in Paradise, California on November 9, 2018
Josh Edelson AFP/File
The heating planet is making refugees even in the world's wealthiest countries.
"Wildfires cause mass displacement, and because these wildfires are exacerbated by climate change, I think that we can start to think about these broad-scale movements as an aspect of climate migration," says Rebecca Miller, a researcher at the University of Southern California (USC) with the "West on Fire" project.
According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, a Norwegian NGO, wildfires have forced an average of more than 200,000 people to leave their homes each year over the past decade.
Nearly three-quarters of them were in the United States, the vast majority in California.
Last year's record-breaking fires, which consumed more than 6,600 square miles (17,000 square kilometers) of forest, according to California fire officials, displaced 600,000 people for varying lengths of time.
'Raising kids in a disaster zone'
Another "climate refugee" from Paradise, Jessica Distefano, still cries when she thinks about the fire that burned her out of her home.
A view of downtown Stowe, Vermont on October 21, 2021
JOSEPH PREZIOSO AFP
"I just felt like I was raising my kids in a disaster zone. Everything around us was burnt," she tells AFP from her new home near Boise, Idaho, three years after fleeing Paradise as it was almost wiped off the map by the ferocious blaze.
The decision to leave Paradise was less clear-cut for Maria Barbosa, who says she was at first determined to rebuild after the blaze destroyed her home.
"I'm in my 70s; I had planned on retiring to Paradise," she said.
"But as I researched and found out what it was going to take -- a woman by herself -- it just seemed overwhelming.
"It seems like a lot of my friends that are my age or older are opting to go elsewhere."
Barbosa, who now lives in a much lower-risk area of Idaho, around 1,000 miles from her old home, says she enjoys going back to visit Paradise, but she knows she could never live there again.
"You don't feel comfortable. Like it would be a constant threat to you every time. Every time there's a wind or a smell of smoke, it comes back."
Each story has its own unique heartbreak, but, says Nina Berlin, who researches human behavior in wildfires at Stanford University, they all have a common thread -- one that will become increasingly familiar as the planet gets hotter.
Businesses burn under a darkened smoky sky in Paradise, north of Sacramento, California in 2018
Josh Edelson AFP/File
"Households are moving toward a tipping point where the factors that are rooting them in place, like their family, like their jobs, like their access to the outdoors, are outweighed by the impacts of wildfire and smoke," she said.
"We're looking at migration as one adaptation strategy among many that individuals might engage in, in order to ideally reduce the exposure to those risks."
No one left: climate change fuels Guatemalan migration
Lazaro Yat's cardamom crops were destroyed by flooding, and he now survives by growing corn on hills that remained above the water
Johan ORDONEZ AFP
Comunidad Cerro Azul (Guatemala) (AFP)
Two powerful hurricanes that struck the north of the Central American country in 2020 decimated cardamom crops, leaving thousands of indigenous people destitute.
"Everyone suffered because their crops were left submerged in water," Yat told AFP from Cerro Azul, a tiny village of barely 500 people at the foot of the mountains in Quiche department.
Hurricanes Eta and Iota ripped through this region in October and November 2020 leaving 200 people dead and massive damage throughout Central America.
Experts say climate change is contributing to ever more devastating weather episodes.
A year ago the banks of the Azul river that runs along the village broke and flooded streets, homes, fields and pastures.
The vast green fields of cardamom were submerged for four months and when the waters receded, they left behind rotting vegetation and sterile soil.
The ground will recover, says Yat, a 42-year-old member of the Mayan Q'eqchi people, but cardamom takes three to four years to bear fruit.
He now survives by growing corn on hills that remained above the flood waters.
'Nothing left'
Oscar, Yat's eldest of four sons who used to help him in the fields, was one of many young people who could not wait and instead set off on the 120-kilometer trek to the Mexican border, hoping to continue on to the United States.
"Some people went northwards (towards the US) because there was no way of surviving here," said Yat.
The river through Cerro Azul village, which overflowed and destroyed cardamom plantations
Carlos ALONZO AFP
Oscar "went for the same reason: we have nothing left. We didn't want to send him but he decided to go ... And we couldn't do anything."
The teenager left in February on a dangerous journey in which many migrants are murdered, kidnapped, tortured or exploited.
Two months later he managed to cross the Mexican border. Now 18, he works in a baker's in Massachusetts.
But he sends home "very little" money because he is still paying off the people-trafficker -- known as a coyote -- that helped him get to the United States.
Two of Oscar's teenage cousins also left.
They are among more than a million Central Americans displaced by the impact of Eta and Iota, according to a study by the International Organization for Migration.
For Alex Guerra, director of Guatemala's institute of investigation on climate change, such natural disasters provoked by global warming are a growing "trigger" for migration in the region.
Thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans and El Salvadorans try every year to reach the United States illegally.
A wooden house in Cerro Azul, Quiche department, Guatemala -- a region slammed by Hurricanes Eta and Iota in 2020
Johan ORDONEZ AFP
They are fleeing poverty and violence, and extreme weather events can "provide the last push that makes people decide to migrate," Guerra told AFP.
In September, the World Bank said climate change could prompt 216 million people to migrate by 2050, including 17 million in Latin America.
'We're already scared'
Cerro Azul residents say they never before had flooding like that provoked by Eta and Iota.
They were part of "the most active" Atlantic cyclone season in history, according to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Of the 30 tropical storms in 2020, 13 were hurricanes, the study said.
Central America is particularly vulnerable to climate change given its location in a cyclone zone, as well as being home to earthquakes, active volcanoes and affected by the El Nino and La Nina phenomenon.
Sonia Choc has turned to growing vegetables and rearing chickens, but many others have left to find work
Johan ORDONEZ AFP
The problems are exacerbated by massive social inequality, poor planning and weak infrastructure.
"There are places where there is flooding more regularly than before, year after year. We have years where there is flooding and drought, sometimes in the same places," said Guerra.
The wooden huts with zinc roofs of Cerro Azul, a remote village accessed only by 325 kilometers of dangerous roads and dirt tracks, provide a poor defense against the elements.
"Whenever it rains hard we're on alert to see what's coming because we're already scared," said Sonia Choc, dressed in a typically colorful Guatemalan outfit.
Cardamom affected by flooding
Johan ORDONEZ AFP
Since her cardamom crops were destroyed, she has been growing vegetables and rearing chickens. Others from the village have left to find work as laborers.
Yat has reached the end of his tether and is on the verge of joining the exodus.
"I think next year, or this year, I'm leaving. I have nothing left here, I can't do any more," he said.
'Never thought we would live like this' -- despair for Peru climate casualties
What was meant to be a temporary arrangement has lasted five years for about 2,000 families from villages and towns ravaged by the flooding of 2017 and thrown together in a camp of ramshackle zinc and straw huts and tents
ERNESTO BENAVIDES AFP
Catacaos (Peru) (AFP)
With her husband and three children, she went from a tranquil, self-sufficient life on a fertile river bank to a straw-topped hut next to a busy highway, with no access to potable water, sanitation, or electricity.
"It was like starting from nothing," the 36-year-old wept as she recounted her experience to AFP at the Santa Rosa camp some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) north of Lima where hundreds of families displaced by the 2017 climate catastrophe were offered refuge.
"We had to buy everything anew, a bed, wardrobes, toilet... because the water took everything."
What was meant to be a temporary arrangement has lasted five years for about 2,000 families from villages and towns ravaged by the flooding and thrown together in a camp of ramshackle zinc and straw huts and tents.
"We have been completely forgotten by the state," said Cahuana's 40-year-old husband, Leopoldo Namuche, who scrapes together a living driving a motorcycle taxi.
The couple keeps few ducks, turkeys and pigs to eat, and Cahuana bakes biscuits to sell to neighbors.
She reminisces longingly of her former life as a small-scale farmer in the hamlet of Santa Rosa, about 20 km away, where they grew their own produce next to the Piura river and had a school, clinic, and other basic services nearby.
"We never thought we would live like this," added Namuche, his wife is pregnant with a fourth child to join Greysi, 12, Hans, nine, and two-year-old Gael.
"It is because of El Nino."
More severe El Nino
With a cycle of every few years, the weather system causes an abnormal warming of the Pacific ocean which in northern Peru translates into excessive rainfall, and drought in other parts of the country.
In 2017, during the warmest five-year period ever recorded on Earth, El Nino hit Peru with particular fierceness.
Torrential rains and floods claimed over 100 lives, and according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) displaced some 300,000 people -- one percent of the country's 33 million population.
El Nino-related devastation is nothing new to Peru. In 1998, 500 people died, and in 1982-3 the toll was about 9,000 from flooding and subsequent disease outbreak.
According to the International Organization for Migration, one in five Peruvians displaced by the 2017 El Nino still have no access to water, and almost half had post-traumatic stress disorder
Ernesto BENAVIDES AFP
Manuel Pulgar Vidal, a former Peruvian environment minister and now climate and energy leader at green group WWF, said evidence was accumulating "that these events... are more frequent and more severe due to climate change."
A 2019 research article published in the PNAS science journal said El Nino events, which hit countries around the equator hardest, have become stronger since the 1970s due to "a background warming in the western Pacific warm pool" -- a mass of high-temperature water where the weather system originates.
If this warming continued, the article warned, "more frequent extreme El Nino events will induce profound socioeconomic consequences."
No school, no shop
A few kilometers from Santa Rosa is another refuge for climate migrants, named San Pablo. It houses about 600 families.
There are no shops, and residents rely on wells for water to drink and irrigate vegetable patches in a place where day temperatures can reach 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit), with few trees to provide shade.
At night, temperatures plummet but the only fuel for cooking or heating is firewood. Only a few have access to solar panels or car batteries for lighting.
At the San Pablo refuge, residents draw water from wells for drinking and watering small vegetable patches in a place where day temperatures reach 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit)
Ernesto BENAVIDES AFP
The nearest medical care is at Catacaos, some 30 minutes by car. Without electricity, there is no internet for the kids to follow classes online since the community school closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic.
"Here, we sleep about four people," said Carlos Javier Silupu Raimundo, pointing to a tiny plywood "room" with a mattress on a sand-and-stone floor.
"We have to be careful because there is always a danger; there could be a scorpion, a snake."
Another San Pablo resident, Esther Juarez Elias, appealed for better living conditions and support: "above all the light, light is the main thing we need."
Experts say climate change has boosted the number of internally displaced Peruvians.
"Such disaster displacement can take a high psychosocial toll on people who have lost their livelihoods and assets, including homes and other infrastructure," said a 2021 IOM report on Peru.
One in five people displaced by the 2017 event, it said, still had no access to water, and almost half had post-traumatic stress disorder.
"Displacement pressure will likely increase, considering projections of more intense rainfall events and related flooding, landslides and riverbank erosion, and more heatwaves in many parts of the country," said the IOM report.
'We had to flee': Somalia on the run from extreme climate
Yurub Abdi Jama, 35, lives in a makeshift shelter outside Hargeisa after losing all her livestock to drought and fleeing to the city
EDUARDO SOTERAS AFP
Hargeisa (Somalia) (AFP)
Her people in northern Somalia had been herding for generations, born on arid land and accustomed to drought. But they could not outlast the final, unrelenting dry spell that scorched the earth and felled their beasts.
"In the past, God would always leave something for us, but now... We had to flee. You go where you can when you lose everything," said Jama, crouched outside the shanty where she now lives, hundreds of miles away in barren hills outside Hargeisa city.
Jama is a climate migrant -- one of tens of thousands on the move in Somalia, where environmental extremes are forcing waves of herders and farmers off the land toward cities ill-equipped to host them.
In recent years, natural disasters -- not conflict -- have been the main driver of displacement in Somalia, a war-torn nation in the Horn of Africa that ranks among the world's most vulnerable to climate change.
Makeshift camps are rising outside cities in Somalia as rural communities flee worsening natural disasters
EDUARDO SOTERAS AFP
Fierce and frequent droughts and floods have uprooted more than three million Somalis since 2016, according to UNHCR data that tracks internal displacement by cause.
The phenomenon is emptying parts of Somalia's rural interior and spawning huge camps on the outskirts of cities, as urban populations swell with desperate migrants seeking a new start.
- Great change -
Most, like Jama, arrive with nothing, and drift in destitution.
She left behind her rural homeland near Aynabo for Hargeisa, an unfamiliar city about 260 kilometres (160 miles) away.
Penniless, she took refuge with other newly-arrived herders in a desolate squatter camp outside town, scavenging enough to build a hut with sticks and cloth for her husband and eight children.
Uba Adan Juma moved to Hargeisa city with her 10 children when her goats died in a terrible drought three years ago
EDUARDO SOTERAS AFP
But the pastoral family lacked the skills needed to earn a living in the beleaguered city, where unemployment and poverty is rife, and women beg on potholed street corners.
At dawn, Jama's husband trudges off in search of work. Most days, he returns empty handed.
"I make next to nothing from town," said Uba Adan Juma, who moved to the city three years ago when her goats died in drought, and struggles to support her family in their bleak new setting.
Both women hail from Somaliland, a poor and isolated northwestern region, where climate change has upended life in just a few generations.
Pastoral communities used to assign names to the great droughts that occurred every decade or so.
"But now, it has changed. Droughts are so frequent, they are nameless," Shukri Haji Ismail, the region's environment minister, told AFP.
She said the country of her youth was lush, blanketed by savannas and fruit trees, and inhabited by native birds and wildlife.
Rural families who lose their livelihood to drought or flood in Somalia often wind up on the outskirts of cities in squatter camps
EDUARDO SOTERAS AFP
A map on her office wall illustrates the sobering reality today: swathes of red indicating land swallowed by the ever-expanding desert, a scourge stretching from Ethiopia to the Gulf of Aden.
"Somaliland is experiencing -- literally -- the word climate change," she told AFP.
"It is not what might happen. It is here, it is there, and we are experiencing it... Our people have really suffered."
- Nowhere to go -
Somalia has experienced two consecutive seasons of below-average rain, with a third on the way.
Harvests have failed and the Famine Early Warning Systems Network warned in August that hunger will worsen by year's end, with 3.5 million people in dire need.
The rain that does fall can prove more a curse than a blessing.
Natural disasters -- not conflict -- have been the main driver of displacement in Somalia in recent years
EDUARDO SOTERAS AFP
Somalia witnessed tremendous flooding in 2020, capped by the strongest tropical storm to hit the country since records began.
Rainfall is projected to become more erratic and extreme over Somalia in coming years, accelerating the flight to cities and stoking greater conflict over limited resources, said Lana Goral from the International Organization for Migration.
"It's quite the dire outlook," said Goral, an expert on climate change and migration in Somalia.
The country's cash-strapped administrations have virtually no capacity to address the unfolding crisis.
Some policymakers have proposed relocating disaster-ravaged communities to the coast as pastoral life becomes increasingly untenable.
"But it takes some time to change the mindsets of the people," Shukri said.
Floods and droughts are emptying parts of Somalia's rural interior and spawning huge camps on the outskirts of cities as urban populations swell with desperate migrants seeking a new start
EDUARDO SOTERAS AFP
Hassan Hussein Ibrahim, from Save the Children, said time was not on their side.
The charity assists 11,000 families in Somaliland with cash stipends but many need new skills to start afresh, he said.
"They will also need to adapt," he told AFP.
It is easier said than done for Jama.
"The drought forced us out," the 35-year-old said, her head in her hands. "We would never have walked away from that life, the life that we loved."
But there's nowhere else left for her to go.
On a recent visit to her village, hoping to find relatives, Jama discovered a ghostly emptiness -- no people, no livestock, no signs of life.
Cruelly, the waterholes were full, with neither man nor beast around to drink from them.
"Life here is difficult as well," she said, referring to the city, "but where would I run to now?"
Bangladesh's shanty towns for climate refugees
The International Displacement Monitoring Centre says nearly five million Bangladeshis have been displaced internally between 2008 and 2014, most moving to Dhaka or Chittagong
Munir UZ ZAMAN AFP
Dhaka (AFP)
Experts say that this impoverished delta nation of 170 million people is set for the biggest displacement in human history -- due to climate change.
"I remember how our house went completely under water during a flood. It happened so quickly, the tip of the roof disappeared in minutes," said Salma, 35, originally from the island of Bhola 300 kilometres (200 miles) south of Dhaka.
"The river was ferocious. It gradually devoured all our farmland and came near our house one day... Our orchards, homestead -- nothing was left," she told AFP outside the shack they share with their four children.
The family now live in a 100-square-feet (10-square-metre) room with some cooking pots and one mattress that they all sleep on.
Each home they had was lost to flooding, forcing Asgar to take out loans for the next one.
Finally unable to borrow more, they left for the teeming slum on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka -- a megacity of 20 million people.
Bangladesh, a low-lying nation of criss-crossing muddy rivers at the top of the Bay of Bengal, has long been battered by nature.
When the Great Bhola Cyclone struck their island in 1970, Asgar's grandparents and several uncles and aunts were among the nearly half a million people who perished.
"The tidal surge rose up to 20 feet (six metres), and so quickly. It washed away my grandparents and the uncles and aunts in a few seconds, right in front of my father's eyes," the 40-year-old said.
"His whole life my father wasn't able to come to terms with this harrowing tragedy," Asgar, who earns around $7.50 a day selling sugarcane juice on the roadside, told AFP, wiping tears from his eyes.
Devoured in the deluge
Cyclones are happening more and more, scientists say. Better forecasting means that people are usually evacuated in time. But combined with ever-more frequent flooding and river erosion, life for many is becoming untenable.
On the bank of the Padma, a tributary of the Ganges, Afsar Dewan shows where his tin, brick and concrete home stood just a day earlier, before it was swept away along with hundreds of other homes in and around the town of Manikganj.
"There were two madrasas (Islamic seminaries) and a mosque over there. All have now been devoured. The graves were washed away. My parents and uncles were laid to rest there," he said.
Now the 65-year-old will have to borrow money -- the interest can sometimes be more than the loan -- but he isn't joining the exodus from the village to Dhaka, 100 kilometres away, insisting he still has farmland to use.
Dhaka has built tens of thousands of homes in the past two years, more than half going to climate refugees -- mainly victims of river erosion, said Tanvir Shakil Joy, an MP and the head of the parliamentary caucus on climate change
Munir UZ ZAMAN AFP
The International Displacement Monitoring Centre says nearly five million Bangladeshis have been displaced internally between 2008 and 2014, most moving to Dhaka or Chittagong.
According to the World Bank, another 13.3 million people could follow them by 2050.
Large numbers also go abroad. Every year some 700,000 Bangladeshis leave for jobs in the Middle East and South-East Asia.
Bangladeshis are one of the main nationalities trying to make it illegally into Europe.
Avoiding discussion
Dhaka has built tens of thousands of homes in the past two years, more than half going to climate refugees -- mainly victims of river erosion, said Tanvir Shakil Joy, an MP and the head of the parliamentary caucus on climate change.
This year Bangladesh plans to build 10,000 more homes for them, disaster management and relief secretary, Mohammad Mohsin, told AFP.
But studies by the state-owned Centre for Geographical and Environment Services, CEGIS, show every year since 2004 some 50,000 people lose their home along the country's two main Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra.
Studies by the state-owned Centre for Geographical and Environment Services, CEGIS, show every year since 2004 some 50,000 people lose their home along the country's two main Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra
Munir UZ ZAMAN AFP
"Bangladesh is home to dozens of big rivers. If you add people who have lost homes to other rivers, the number people who lose homes annually will be more than 100,000," said Mominul Haque Sarker, a University of Manchester-trained adviser of CEGIS.
At the upcoming COP26 in Glasgow, Bangladesh will again highlight the challenges it is facing due to the extreme weather events, and call for international help to help adapt.
"But when we speak about the climate migration in the international forum, the rich nations just avoid the discussion," Joy said.
"The Western nations, who are mainly responsible for global warming, have yet to recognise that climate change is behind massive migration and displacement,' he said.
"They go into panic mode the moment we raise the issues of climate refugees. Their apprehension is if they recognise this they may have to accept some of these refugees."
'Nowhere is safe': Philippine typhoon victims live in fear
A year after a powerful storm sent an avalanche of volcanic rock and sand crashing down, burying her house, Philippine food vendor Florivic Baldoza still lives in an evacuation centre
Ted ALJIBE AFP
Guinobatan (Philippines) (AFP)
As global warming brings increasingly extreme weather, she now fears "nowhere is safe".
Hundreds of families from poor villages around Mayon volcano in Albay province on the country's most populous island of Luzon are waiting for new homes after Typhoon Goni pounded the region last November.
"That's the strongest I've ever experienced," Baldoza, 40, told AFP, standing on a mound of dark sand that now covers the house she once shared with her husband and two teenage daughters.
Several hundred thousand people fled as Goni barrelled towards the archipelago nation -- ranked as one of the world's most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
But some residents in San Francisco village -- including Baldoza's family -- ignored warnings to shelter in a school, confident a river dike built several years ago would protect them from flooding.
As the most powerful typhoon to hit the country last year dumped heavy rain on an area still sodden from another cyclone a week earlier, Baldoza realised her family was in peril when water began cascading over the several metres high cement wall.
The Philippines is ranked as one of the world's most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change
Ted ALJIBE AFP
They bolted to her mother's house across the road as a devastating mix of water, volcanic sand and boulders smashed the dike further upstream and tore through the village.
"We were trapped inside the house," Baldoza told AFP. "We were crying, my husband was separated from us -- we thought he was dead."
Lucky to be alive, but trapped in deep mud, Baldoza and eight relatives, including children, twisted their bodies from side to side to escape, then climbed out a window and up on to the roof.
Her husband, Alexander, survived by scrambling up a mango tree.
Holding on to a powerline to avoid being blown away by fierce winds, the family clambered over the top of several houses before reaching a taller building.
"Our house was being hit by boulders, but we couldn't do anything," said Baldoza, who watched helplessly as the torrent swept away the family's motorised tricycle and motorbike.
"If we hadn't left our house, we would have died."
- 'Disaster capital' -
It is not the first time excessive rain has forced Baldoza to relocate.
About 23 years ago, before Baldoza got married, her mother sold their house in a flood-prone area of the same village and moved the family to higher ground.
"We didn't expect that we would experience the same thing," Baldoza said.
"I don't think there's a safe place anymore. Wherever we go, we get flooded."
Baldoza visits the site of her house most days as she sells home-cooked meals and soft drinks to workers repairing the damaged dike.
"I feel like crying because I raised my children here, this is where they were baptised, my husband and I were married here," she said.
Baldoza's family now lives in a classroom in the nearby Marcial O. Ranola Memorial School, which has been converted into an emergency evacuation centre.
Around 170,000 people were exposed to mudflows from the slopes of Mayon, the country's most active volcano, said Eugene Escobar, head of the research division of the Albay Public Safety and Emergency Management Office
Ted ALJIBE AFP
Face-to-face classes have been banned in the Philippines since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Families in Albay province, dubbed the nation's "disaster capital", are used to spending a few days every rainy reason in shelters.
About a quarter of the roughly 20 storms and typhoons to hit the Philippines every year affect the impoverished region, wiping out crops, homes and infrastructure.
A year after the mudflow upended their lives, a hundred families are still at the school, sleeping in classrooms and cooking in makeshift kitchens.
Despite the hardships, Baldoza tries to keep life as normal as possible for her family. Their pet dogs and cats roam around the classroom which is divided by curtains into sleeping and living areas.
Her youngest daughter recently turned 18 and they all dressed up for a traditional coming-of-age party.
But Baldoza worries about the future of her children.
"The storms are getting stronger," she said. "How will they survive if we're gone?"
- 'You can't stop typhoons' -
Many houses in San Francisco are still partially buried in the volcanic sand and rocks that swamped the village, elevating the ground level and reducing the height of coconut trees.
Residents have dug trenches around the perimeter of their homes so they can get inside. Some are still shovelling out debris.
Albay climate change activist Bill Bontigao said Goni was a "wake-up call" and urgent action was needed to prepare the region for stronger cyclones.
"I'm worried that the next generations, my nephews and nieces, won't have a good future," Bontigao, 21, told AFP.
Around 170,000 people were exposed to mudflows from the slopes of Mayon, the country's most active volcano, said Eugene Escobar, head of the research division of the Albay Public Safety and Emergency Management Office.
Around one quarter of the roughly 20 storms and typhoons to hit the Philippines every year affect the impoverished region, wiping out crops, homes and infrastructure
Ted ALJIBE AFP
More mudflows were likely as climate change warmed the planet and increased the "frequency and intensity of typhoons and rain", Escobar told AFP.
The "cheapest solution" was to relocate vulnerable residents to safer areas and provide them with social and economic support, he said.
"You can't stop typhoons... we have to accept the fact that we are in a disaster-prone area."
But Baldoza fears "nowhere is safe" in Guinobatan municipality -- including the new village where her family has been given a 25-square-metre house.
It is about a half hour drive from San Francisco where her husband still works as an electrician, but they have no money to rent or buy somewhere closer.
"Once we move in I'll have it blessed so we'll be lucky here," Baldoza said, standing at the front door of the tiny house, cheerfully painted white, aqua, pink and blue.
"We hope it's safer."
Issued on: 26/10/2021 -© 2021 AFP
