'People are dying': how the climate crisis has sparked an exodus to the US : The Guardian

"As part of the Running Dry series, the Guardian looks at how drought and famine are forcing Guatemalan families to choose between starvation and migration
by Nina Lakhani in Camotán

At sunrise, the misty fields around the village of Guior are already dotted with men, women and children sowing maize after an overnight rainstorm.

After several years of drought, the downpour brought some hope of relief to the subsistence farmers in this part of eastern Guatemala.

But as Esteban Gutiérrez, 30, takes a break from his work, he explains why he is still willing to incur crippling debts – and risk his life – to migrate to the United States.

“My children have gone to bed hungry for the past three years. Our crops failed and the coffee farms have cut wages to $4 a day,” he says, playing nervously with the white maize kernels in a plastic trough strapped to his waist."

Read The Guardian article

Related:  

Heatwave: think it’s hot in Europe? The human body is already close to thermal limits elsewhere :The Conversation

Global warming is increasing the chances of worldwide harvest failure on the scale of the tragic 19th century drought and famine that claimed 50 million lives.

Awaiting aid in drought-ravaged Somalia in 2011. Image: Stuart Price/UN Multimedia

"LONDON − Climate change driven by human-induced global warming could recreate the conditions for a re-run of one of the most tragic episodes in human history, the Great Drought and Global Famine of 1875 to 1878.

Those years were marked by widespread and prolonged droughts in Asia, Brazil and Africa, triggered by a coincidence of unusual conditions in the Pacific, Indian, and North Atlantic Oceans.

The famine – made more lethal by the political constraints linked to 19th-century colonial domination of three continents – is now thought to have claimed up to 50 million lives.

And the message contained in new research published in the Journal of Climate is stark: what happened before could happen again."

Read the Climate Change blog article

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