honduras: hurricane mitch victims mobilise against climate change
The 1998 Hurricane Mitch was the western hemisphere’s most deadly hurricane in two centuries. It directly affected about half of Honduras’s six million people and left about two million homeless. Yet climate change is expected to bring more extreme weather to Honduras, which is already vulnerable to tropical storms, land slides, floods and droughts.
Families in poor communities in Tegucigalpa and neighbouring Comayagüela (which together form the Honduran capital) are the most affected, due to deforestation and vulnerability to landslides. These communities also lack the necessary organisation and leadership to educate and mobilise their residents to demand better conditions.
Stepping in to fill this void, Friends of the Earth Honduras / Movimiento Madre Tierra sought to increase the communities’ resilience by training, organizing and mobilizing female community leaders. These women are from Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela communities which are vulnerable, affected, or at-risk from climate change-related natural disasters.
This work followe on from the group's succesful workshops which built the capacity of local communitites to carry out reforestation on orchard planting in Mitch's aftermath.
what happened: First, FoE Honduras met with these 25 women from 20 poor communities in Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela. These community leaders had worked to help rebuild houses and walls and to carry out reforestation and orchard planting in Mitch’s aftermath. The participants are affiliated with the youth branch of FoE Honduras, which is called Juventud Madre Tierra, as well as COHAPAZ (Honduran Action Committee for Peace), and other women’s organizations.
At the meeting they presented ideas and initiatives, and agreed on selection criteria for project participants, the workshop contents, and other organizational issues. The women were trained in knowledge of climate change issues, to increase community awareness and mobilize women who are affected. FoE Honduras also developed an educational brochure about climate change and how woman are affected by it.
A series of participative workshops were then carried out on: communities’ adaptation to climate change; climate changes policies and post-hurricane Mitch experiences; and community plans and visions which considered what the impacts would have been if no community movement were organized.
what is changing: Before the workshops, the communities were not aware of the complexity of climate change. Through this project FoE Honduras managed to train leaders from these 20 poor communities of Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela, and established their commitment to continue the reforestation process in their communities.
what we learned: The projects faced a number problems, including insufficient funds to carry out reforestation in all the communities. Initially a lack of awareness from the communities also provided a challenge, but this was overcome through the planned activities. The project also strengthened FoE Honduras’s work around climate change issues.
with thanks to our funders: the sigrid rausing trust
