In the meantime, everyone is salvaging what they can of their former lives. A number of families, about 60 of the 300 or so, have already decided to move to the safer inland location. For now, most are surviving with donated food and fishing supplies, hoping for government assistance, and building temporary shacks where their houses once stood. While scientists and community leaders can advise, in the end, it’s up to the residents to decide where, or if, they want to go. That’s a change many aren’t ready to make, not yet. It would mean abandoning a cultural way of life by the sea and taking up farming. But moving inland, while safer from hurricanes, comes with a price. And having surveyed the damage, researchers agree that moving inland is the safe course of action. Castro and other leaders have identified a tract of land suitable for resettlement, located a few miles inland along the canal. Lorenzo Castro is a community leader, whose family has lived in the region for generations. Gone, too, are the coconut trees and a dietary staple. Now all the rotting material and saltwater have upset the lagoon’s ecological balance, and they’re endangering the freshwater fish. If these mangroves don’t recover, then the fish, Haulover’s key source of food and livelihood, may not either. Donald Williams, a marine biologist, says that local fish and wildlife need mangroves to survive. When the team sets out, it finds Nicaragua’s vast old mangrove forests battered and broken … … along with wildlife that appear to be disoriented or hurt. And it was the most active hurricane season in the Atlantic. 2020 tied for the hottest year on record for the planet. He’s sending a team of researchers to Haulover to assess storm damage and to determine if it’s even a viable place for people to live anymore. Should they rebuild in the only area they’ve ever known, or should they seek refuge inland, away from the sea? One person advising displaced residents is Marcos Williamson, an environmental scientist at the Regional Autonomous University in Puerto Cabezas. Now people here are facing a new dilemma. As climate change intensifies, hurricanes are becoming more destructive, and these coastal communities are bearing the brunt. Nicaragua has seen storms before, but never like this. Where once there was a verdant coconut grove, the ocean now cut through the center of town, connecting to a lagoon. When the skies cleared, the coastline had been transformed. The Indigenous Miskito village of Haulover suffered a direct hit. First, Hurricane Eta, then just two weeks later, the most powerful Atlantic hurricane of the season, Iota. TV announcer: “Hurricane Eta, right now.” “Across the western side of the Caribbean.” “- 155 miles per hour.” In November, two monster storms slammed into Nicaragua’s northeast coast. Faced with a future of intensifying storms, the residents must now consider whether to abandon their way of life by the ocean and move inland. Transcript Rebuild or Leave ‘Paradise’: Climate Change Dilemma Facing a Nicaraguan Coastal Town Two major November hurricanes slammed into the same part of the Nicaraguan coast, laying waste to the Miskito village of Haulover.
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