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 Editorials | Environmental | March 2005 
Mexico's Gulf Coast in Peril from Global Warming
 Keralanext
Alvarado, Mexico - In this sweaty Gulf of Mexico fishing village, poor families in dirt-floor homes dream, like millions of people around the world, of owning air-conditioned cars and refrigerators.
Scraping out a living by fishing, and preoccupied by the constant threat of water contamination from factory waste and leaky oil pipelines, fishermen here have never heard of global warming.
Yet their proximity to the sea, with waves lapping just footsteps from their doorways, means they are likely to be among the first victims of climate change in Mexico, their homes underwater by the time their grandchildren are old.
And while the main culprits for the blanket of greenhouse gases heating up the Earth are the United States and other developed countries, carbon emissions are set to keep rising as developing nations grow richer.
"I would love to have a car," said fisherman Luis Tibursio, 45, whose house already floods in the rainy season.
"These machines are good and bad at the same time. But we can't fight what's happening because we all want a better life," he said in a coastal community by the town of Alvarado, where the well-off families are the ones with donkeys and pigs tethered outside their homes.
Experts say the lowest-lying villages along the southern Gulf of Mexico coast will be hit first in Mexico as the fog of gas belched out by rich countries sends weather patterns haywire. They predict melting glaciers will swell global sea levels by up to 3 feet (1 meter) by 2100.
"Global warming is here and it's already affecting us. Our coasts are at risk from rising seas and hurricanes. We'll see droughts in the North and floods in the South," said Fernando Tudela, an environment ministry undersecretary who represented Mexico in global climate change talks.
"The process is slow but inexorable. There's no way to stop it. All we can do is take action to limit it," he said.
One of the first Latin American countries to sign the 141-nation Kyoto Protocol, an emissions-cutting pact in force since Feb. 16, Mexico is exempt, as a less-developed country, from the first round of cuts. |
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