Climate

Even as the thick clouds of smoke from wildfires raging in eastern Canada, which blanketed the U.S. East Coast in a dangerous orange haze, begin to dissipate, researchers are warning it’s a sign of the times.

Canada’s fire outlook will remain higher than normal for June. And on a larger scale, climate change is projected to make fire conditions more common across Canada, Russia and Alaska’s boreal forests.

The current fires were sparked by lightning in the Canadian province of Quebec; like much of Canada, parts of Quebec were abnormally dry this spring.

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Their smoky haze has dominated headlines, prompting warnings of dangerous air pollution levels. People were urged to stay indoors as much as possible, or wear masks, to avoid inhaling the fine particulate matter. The smoke, a toxic brew of irritant gases and tiny particles, can cause asthma, respiratory and cardiovascular problems, and can exacerbate existing conditions such as diabetes and chronic lung conditions (SN: 6/17/22; SN: 9/18/20).

Wildfire-driven air pollution is all too familiar to residents of the Pacific Northwest and the U.S. West, where most of the continent’s large wildfires occur, but it’s less common in the eastern part of North America. So June’s headline-grabbing haze might be a wake-up call to East Coast policy makers about the hazards of climate change, some researchers hope.

Smoke from wildfires in Eastern Canada shrouded New York City (shown) and other cities along the U.S. East Coast in a thick haze of fine particles on June 7, leading to a Code Purple day indicating the air was very unhealthy.ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

There’s plenty of historical precedent for that, says Nicholas Bond, state climatologist for the state of Washington, who is based in Seattle. “There were some periods when dust [from the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s] made it all the way to Washington, D.C., bringing attention to the disaster that was occurring in the Plains states,” he says.

Whether eastern Canada’s forests in particular will become more fire-prone due to climate change isn’t clear from recent simulations of future climate and fire behavior. The current fires are not necessarily a harbinger of things to come so much as a reminder of what’s already here: They’re burning in regions that are already considered at risk of fire.

Climate change is projected to boost fires across other vast swaths of boreal forest in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s already having an impact. “Wildfires in the boreal forests of Alaska burned more acres in the past 20 years” than in the previous 20 years, Bond says. How much of the forest is on fire can vary significantly from year to year; 2020 was below-average, with about 73,000 hectares burned. But the overall trend of burned area in boreal forests is expected to curve steeply upward by the middle of the century: The acreage of burned area in Alaska is projected to increase by 24 to 169 percent from 2020 to 2050.

Fire seasons in boreal forests are also expected to last longer and produce larger fires each year. Climate change may also increase the frequency of lightning strikes that spark fires such as those currently burning in Quebec — although that, too, is still uncertain.

Canada is currently fighting severe fires across the country, from coast to coast, stretching its resources thin — and the threat is expected to remain high in the coming weeks, the Canadian government reported on June 5.

That’s also true for the United States. “The Pacific Northwest is liable to be dealing with considerable smoke later this summer,” Bond says, based on a fire potential outlook report released June 1 by the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center. “For personal, selfish reasons I hope the winds do not bring the smoke our way.” More

It’s hard to know how busy this year’s Atlantic hurricane season will be, thanks to a rarely observed combination of ocean and climate conditions.

The Atlantic Ocean is in an active storm era, a yearslong period of increasing storm activity. Plus sea surface temperatures there are much higher than usual this year, which can fuel storms, Matthew Rosencrans, the lead hurricane forecaster for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said May 25 at a news conference. But this year will also see the onset of an El Niño phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ocean and climate pattern, which tends to suppress hurricane formation.

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That’s not a scenario that has occurred in historical records often, Rosencrans said. “It’s definitely kind of a rare setup for this year.”

He and his colleagues reported that there’s a 40 percent chance that Atlantic hurricane activity will be near normal this year. Near normal is actually unusually high for an El Niño year. But there’s also a 30 percent chance that activity will be above normal, and a 30 percent chance it’ll be below normal.

Overall, the agency is predicting 12 to 17 named storms, of which five to nine are predicted to become hurricanes, with sustained wind speeds of at least 119 kilometers per hour (74 miles per hour). Between one and four of those hurricanes could be category 3 or greater, with wind speeds of at least 178 kph (111 mph). The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins on June 1 and ends November 30.

There’s little consensus among other groups’ predictions, in part due to the uncertainty of what role El Niño will play. On April 13, Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, announced that it anticipated a below-average season, with just 13 named storms, including six hurricanes. On May 26, the U.K. Meteorological Office announced that it predicts an extremely busy hurricane season in the Atlantic, with 20 named storms, including 11 hurricanes, of which five could be category 3 or greater. The long-term average from 1991 to 2020 is 14 named storms.

So far, 23 different groups have submitted predictions for the 2023 Atlantic season to a platform hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, which allows users to compare and contrast the various predictions. There’s a large spread among these predictions, ranging “from below average to well above average,” says Philip Klotzbach, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University who is responsible for the group’s seasonal Atlantic hurricane forecasts.

That spread is likely the result of two big sources of uncertainty, Klotzbach says: the strength of the El Niño (and when during the year it’s expected to develop), and whether the Atlantic’s surface water temperatures will stay above average.

Each group’s forecast is based on a compilation of many different computer simulations of ocean and atmospheric conditions that might develop during the hurricane season. How often those models agree leads to a probability estimate. NOAA’s models struggled to agree: “That’s why probabilities are not 60 to 70 percent,” Rosencrans said. “That’s to reflect there’s a lot of uncertainty this year in the outlook.”

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An emerging El Niño phase is signaled by abnormally warm waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which in turn is tied to shifts in wind strength and humidity around the globe. One of the ways that El Niño tinkers with climate is that it alters the strength of winds in the upper atmosphere over the northern Atlantic Ocean. Those stronger winds can shear off the tops of developing storms, hampering hurricane formation. Warmer ocean waters like those in the Atlantic right now, on the other hand, fuel hurricanes by adding energy to storm systems. How active a season it will be depends on which of those two forces will prevail.

The Met Office, for example, reported that its climate simulations suggest that the wind shear due to this year’s El Niño will be relatively weak, while surface ocean temperatures will remain well above average. Similarly anomalously warm waters in 2017 were found the be the primary cause behind that year’s glut of intense Atlantic hurricanes (SN: 9/28/18).

In the future, hurricane forecasts could become ever more uncertain. It’s unknown how climate change will affect large-scale ocean and climate patterns such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation in general (SN: 8/21/19). Computer simulations have suggested that as the atmosphere warms, these globe-scale “teleconnections” may become somewhat disconnected, which also makes them potentially harder to predict (SN: 2/13/23). Climate change is also expected to increase ocean temperatures.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Pacific Ocean’s hurricane season has already begun with a powerful storm, Super Typhoon Mawar, which battered Guam as a category 4 cyclone before roaring toward the Philippines on May 25, strengthening to category 5. More

A worldwide gearshift from fossil fuel–powered cars to electric vehicles could significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that humans emit to the atmosphere. But current strategies for vehicle electrification can also shift some pollution to communities already suffering under higher economic, health and environmental burdens, researchers warn.

California, which leads the United States by a mile when it comes to EV adoption, offers a window into this evolving problem. The state is aggressively seeking to reduce its carbon footprint and has made substantial increases in wind and solar power generation as well as in the promotion of electric vehicle purchases. One tool the state has used is the California Clean Vehicle Rebate Project, or CVRP, which kicked off in 2010 and offers consumers money back for the purchase or lease of new EVs.

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Now, an analysis of the CVRP’s impact on the state’s air quality from 2010 to 2021 reveals both good and bad news, researchers report May 3 in PLOS Climate.

To assess the impact of the CVRP on a community and statewide level, the team developed a computer model that incorporates data on where the rebates went, how much additional electricity would be required to power those vehicles, which of the state’s electric generating units would provide that power and how much pollution they might produce.

The team then overlapped these data with a mapping tool called CalEnviroScreen that identifies which of the state’s more than 8,000 census tracts — county subdivisions used in population assessments — are the most vulnerable to pollution. That vulnerability measure is based not only on exposure to pollutants such as power plant emissions and unsafe water but also on factors such as income, education level, access to health care and linguistic isolation.

The good news is that the CVRP is responsible for making a dent in the state’s overall CO2 emissions, reducing them by about 280,000 metric tons per year on average, says environmental scientist Jaye Mejía-Duwan of the University of California, Berkeley. In 2020, transportation in California produced about 160 million tons of CO2, about 40 percent of the total 370 million tons of CO2 emitted by the state that year.

The program has also reduced the state’s overall emissions of other types of air-polluting gases, including sulfur dioxide and several nitrogen oxide gases collectively called NOx.

The bad news is that the most disadvantaged communities in the state didn’t see the same overall improvement in air quality, Mejía-Duwan and colleagues found. Those communities didn’t have the same decreases in sulfur dioxide and NOx gases — and in fact saw an increase in one type of air pollution, tiny particulates known as PM2.5 (SN: 7/30/20). “These particles are small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and cross over into the bloodstream,” increasing the risk of cancer, cardiovascular problems and cognitive decline, Mejía-Duwan says.  

Where the power is

California uses a computer model called CalEnviroScreen, currently in its fourth version, to determine levels of vulnerability to the impacts of pollution. The most disadvantaged communities (darker blue) are determined by both pollutant exposure and socioeconomic factors. The state’s electricity-generating units (EGUs, circles) are disproportionately located in the most disadvantaged communities. That reveals how increasing electrification, which includes power generated by nonrenewable sources, could increase pollution in many of the most disadvantaged communities.

Pollution impact by community

J. Mejía-Duwan, M. Hino and K. J. Mach/PLOS Climate 2023

J. Mejía-Duwan, M. Hino and K. J. Mach/PLOS Climate 2023

That increase may be indirectly related to putting more EVs on the road. Although electric vehicles themselves don’t produce PM2.5 from their tailpipes, increased electricity generation, if it’s not fossil fuel–free, can. Renewable resources, including rooftop solar cells, supplied about half of California’s electricity in 2022. But natural gas–fired power plants still provide a hefty chunk of the state’s power.

“Electric vehicles are often incorrectly referred to as ‘zero-emission vehicles,’ but they’re only as clean as the underlying electric grid from which the energy is sourced,” Mejía-Duwan says. The most disadvantaged 25 percent of the state’s communities also contain 50 percent of the power plants, the team found.

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EVs also tend to be relatively heavy due to their hefty batteries. And “heavier vehicles can produce as much if not more particulate matter” than equivalently sized fossil fuel-powered cars, due to brake, tire or road wear, Mejía-Duwan says.

Increasing the cleanliness of the electric grid would help, as would changes to the management of the state’s generated power, the researchers say. California’s solar, wind and hydroelectric energy production has grown rapidly. But the battery technology to store and use that energy later lags behind. Most of that energy is generated during the day, so some researchers have suggested plugging in electric vehicles while it’s light out to take advantage of the daytime glut of electricity — and then using the vehicles to help power houses at nighttime (SN: 12/22/21).

But, clever as that idea is, it doesn’t address the underlying factors behind these inequities. Since 2010, the CVRP has provided over 400,000 rebates for EVs of up to $7,500, depending on income. Yet, as it turns out, those rebates have disproportionately gone to the least disadvantaged communities. “That’s a major driver of these inequities,” Mejía-Duwan says.

Changing that isn’t an easy fix. The state has tried several ways to address the issue, such as by imposing an income cap on eligibility.

But those efforts have had little effect, particularly given strong barriers that stand in the way of the adoption of EVs by people in disadvantaged communities. One roadblock is that prospective EV buyers must have enough money for a down payment, and then fill out forms and be able to wait several months for the rebate money. Another is that car manufacturers are trending toward producing larger, more expensive EVs. Chevrolet, for example, announced in April that its most affordable EV, the Bolt, will be discontinued as the company pivots to producing electric SUVs.

There’s also a lack of equitable access to vehicle charging infrastructure. And then there are subtler but no less insidious issues, such as “a lack of sufficient multicultural and multilingual outreach about EVs, plus the fact that people of color and minoritized communities report facing discrimination at dealerships,” Mejía-Duwan says.

These findings echo and support researchers’ longtime concerns about how current programs to encourage vehicle electrification will disproportionately impact people. “It’s not a surprise,” says Román Partida-López, senior legal counsel for transportation equity at The Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, Calif. “What [California] is doing is a move in the right direction, but it’s not enough.”

California and other states pursuing aggressive zero-emissions policies need to shift their thinking, Partida-López says, to be more intentional about targeting their efforts toward the communities experiencing the greatest impacts (SN: 12/14/22). Rebates, in particular, are known to be an inequitable approach, he says, because they “assume you have the money up front to be able to put down a down payment of several thousand dollars.”

A better strategy to reduce the barriers to EV adoption, he says, would be to provide other types of incentives, such as vouchers that low-income households could use at the time of purchase as well as accessible financing programs.

After all, making EVs accessible to everyone is going to be essential to the big picture of transitioning to zero emissions (SN: 1/27/23). “We’re not going to meet any of those goals unless we center equity” in program designs, Partida-López says. “The focus has always been, ‘How do we transform the market?’ We need to change the narrative to ‘How are we going to focus on the people most impacted, to help with this transition?’”

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As the Arctic’s icebound ground warms, it may unleash toxic substances across the region.

By the end of the century, the thaw threatens to destabilize facilities at more than 2,000 industrial sites, such as mines and pipelines, and further compromise more than 5,000 already contaminated areas, researchers report March 28 in Nature Communications.

Those numbers come from the first comprehensive study to pinpoint where Arctic permafrost thaw could release industrial pollutants. But there are probably even more contaminated areas that we don’t know about, says permafrost researcher Moritz Langer of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany. “We only see the tip of the iceberg.”

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Toxic substances released from these locations could jeopardize fish and other animals living in Arctic waterways, as well as the health of people who depend on them.

Permafrost is any soil, sediment or rock that remains frozen for at least two years. Step on the ground in the Arctic and chances are that permafrost lies underfoot. For decades, people have treated the frozen earth as staunch and largely immobile. Industries constructed infrastructure atop its firmness, and within it they buried their refuse and sludge. In some places, scientists and others have used permafrost to store radioactive waste.

But the Arctic is warming nearly four times as fast as the rest of the planet as a result of climate change, and as much as 65 percent of the region’s permafrost may disappear by 2100 (SN: 8/11/22).

That could release some worrisome things, says climate scientist Kimberley Miner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who wasn’t involved in the study. In 2021, Miner and her colleagues warned that the thawing of Arctic permafrost could release antibiotic-resistant bacteria, viruses and radioactive waste from nuclear-testing programs into the environment.

Keen to identify where the warming could spread industrial pollutants, Langer and his colleagues first analyzed the range of Arctic permafrost and whereabouts of industrial infrastructure. They identified about 4,500 sites — including oil fields, mines and abandoned military installations — in places where permafrost probably exists. Next, the team used contamination data from Alaska and Canada — regions with accessible records — and found that as of January 2021, about 3,600 contaminated locations occupy the two regions. These include waste areas and places where pollutants were accidentally released.

Realistically, these numbers are probably deflated, Langer says, because many incidents of contamination have probably gone undocumented.

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Focusing on Alaska, the researchers found that diesel, gasoline and related petrochemicals make up about half of the pollutants reported. Lead, arsenic and mercury — substances toxic to fish, people and other organisms — were reported too. But in many cases, the type of pollutant was not documented. “That’s a big problem,” Langer says, in part because it makes understanding the risks of a particular leak or spill much harder.

Using the locations of industrial sites and North American contamination data, Langer and colleagues extrapolated where industrial contamination and permafrost might coexist across the entirety of the Arctic, finding 13,000 to 20,000 such sites may exist today. Then, they used computer simulations to investigate the impact of current and future levels of climate change.

Today, there may already be a risk of permafrost degrading at about 1,000 of the known industrial sites and 2,200 to 4,800 of the known and estimated contaminated locations, they found.

In a low-emissions scenario in which warming rises by up to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, those numbers increase to more than 2,100 industrial sites and 5,600 to 10,000 contaminated areas. An increase of about 4.3 degrees C would probably affect almost all the known and projected locations.

“We’re going to need to think about keeping [pollutants] where they need to be,” Miner says, “not just leaving them on the landscape where we feel like.”

The new findings are probably conservative, Langer says, partly because the analysis didn’t consider that infrastructure itself can warm the ground. What’s more, even if it doesn’t fully thaw, “warming of the permafrost causes quite a bit of problem,” says civil engineer Guy Doré of Université Laval in Quebec City, who wasn’t involved in the study. Permafrost that warms from –5° C to –2° C can lose half of its load-bearing capacity, he says, destabilizing infrastructure.

Today, no international regulations mandate industries in the Arctic to document the substances they use and store, or what happens to them. Without that information, Langer says, it’ll be difficult to assess and manage the growing risk of contamination.

He plans to visit decades-old oil drilling facilities in Canada to study how the changing permafrost has affected the containment of drilling fluids. “That’s the next step,” he says, “to understand better how [industrial contaminants] spread into the landscape.” More

Fast-forming droughts are occurring more often and with greater speed in many parts of the world due to climate change, a new study finds. These “flash droughts” are replacing more typical, slower ones and are harder to predict and prepare for, which could make their management more difficult.

Most major droughts have tended to occur over seasonal or yearly time scales, resulting from variability in large-scale climate patterns such as El Niño (SN: 2/13/23). But in roughly the last six decades, there has been a transition toward more droughts that form over just a few weeks with little warning in most of the world, researchers report in the April 14 Science.

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“This finding has massive implications for ecosystem conservation and agricultural management,” says Christine O’Connell, an ecosystem ecologist at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., who was not involved in the study. “Will some species of plants be less able to survive a trend towards flash droughts? What would that mean for biodiversity or the amount of carbon stored in an ecosystem?”

Some flash droughts develop into seasonal ones, yet even those that do not can cause significant damage to agriculture and contribute to other extreme weather events such as wildfires and heat waves. In the summer of 2012, a severe flash drought across the United States caused over $30 billion in damages. Many affected areas transformed from normal conditions to extreme drought within a month, and no climate models predicted it.

Previous research has suggested that flash droughts are on the rise in some areas. But it was unclear whether they were replacing slower-onset droughts, meaning the usually slow droughts were coming on faster, or if both fast- and slow-onset droughts were increasing in tandem.

To find out, Xing Yuan, a hydrologist at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in China, and colleagues analysed soil moisture data from around the world from 1951 to 2014. They distinguished between flash and slow subseasonal droughts by exploring the rate at which soils dried during the initial period of drought onset, then calculated how often each occurred and the geographic spread.

The speed of drought onset on subseasonal scales has increased in much of the world, the team found. And the ratio of fast to slow droughts has increased in over 74 percent of global regions set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Extreme Events. Certain regions such as South Australia, North and East Asia, the Sahara, Europe and the western coast of South America were most affected.

By comparing climate models that included or omitted factors like greenhouse gases, the researchers found that human-induced climate change is a major influence on the global trends. These patterns intensify under higher-emission scenarios, and the onset speed for droughts also increases.

The climate anomalies, such as heat waves, driving these flash droughts are more extreme than those that drive seasonal or interannual droughts, which leads to severe droughts in a shorter time, Yuan says.

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As with most droughts, a period of low rainfall is still the main driver of flash droughts. But excessive evapotranspiration — water moving into the atmosphere from soil and plants — plays a key role in these droughts’ emergence by drying out soils quickly, the analysis shows. Flash droughts happen two to three times as often in humid regions such as northwest North America, Europe and southern China as elsewhere, the study found.

As the world continues to warm, causing more evapotranspiration and less rainfall, flash drought frequency is expected to continue to rise, the researchers say.

The study is “very important as we are living in it now,” says Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln who first coined the term “flash droughts” 20 years ago but wasn’t involved in the new research. “We now have more data to confirm my hunch that the interplay of drought with winds, evapotranspiration and heat waves in particular could really lead to rapid onset drought.”

Predicting flash droughts is challenging as current monitoring systems often cannot capture their onset at short enough time scales. “We have to improve these systems,” Yuan says, by exploring the mechanisms behind flash droughts and improving simulations, perhaps with the help of artificial intelligence. 

Dealing with these droughts isn’t just about having a better tool set, Svoboda says, but also a different mind-set. “It is human nature not to deal with drought until you’re in it. Instead, we advocate that drought be dealt with proactively instead of reactively.” More

In pictures from high above, the island of Gardi Sugdub resembles a container shipyard — small, brightly colored dwellings are jammed together cheek to jowl. At ground level, the island, one of more than 350 in the San Blas archipelago off the northern coast of Panama, is hot, flat and crowded. More than 1,000 people occupy the narrow dwellings that cover virtually every bit of the 150-by-400-meter island, which is slowly being swallowed by rising seas driven by climate change.

This year, about 300 families from Gardi Sugdub are expected to begin moving to a new community on the mainland. The resettlement plan was initiated by the residents there more than a decade ago when they could no longer deny that the island couldn’t accommodate the growing population. Rising seas and intense storms are only making the predicament more dire.

Many of the older adults will opt to stay put. Some still don’t believe climate change poses a threat, but 70-year-old Pedro Lopez is not among them. Lopez, whose cousin interpreted for him during our Zoom interview, currently shares a small house with 16 family members and the family dog. He doesn’t plan to move. He knows Gardi Sugdub, translated as Crab Island, along with many others in the archipelago, is going underwater, but he believes it won’t happen within his lifetime.

The Indigenous Guna people have occupied these Caribbean islands since around the mid-1800s, when they abandoned the coastal jungle area near what is now the Panama-Colombia border to establish better trade and escape disease-carrying pests. Now, they are among the estimated hundreds of millions of people worldwide who by the end of the century may be forced to flee their land because of rising sea levels (SN: 5/9/20 & 5/23/20, p. 22).

In the Caribbean, sea level rise currently averages around 3 to 4 millimeters per year. As global temperatures continue to rise, it is expected to hit 1 centimeter per year or more by century’s end.

All of the islands of the San Blas archipelago will eventually be underwater and uninhabitable, says Steven Paton, who directs the Physical Monitoring Program at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “Some may need to be abandoned very soon while others not for many decades,” he adds.

Anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith of the University of Florida in Gainesville has studied people who are forced from their homes by disasters for more than 50 years. Around the world, he says, climate change has become a major driver of displacement, with people who have limited resources facing the worst of it.

The impacts of climate change — flooding, rising seas and erosion — are threatening the Tuvaluans in the South Pacific, the Mi’Kmaq of Prince Edward Island in Canada and the Shinnecock Indian Nation of New York. Half of some 1,600 remaining tribe members there still occupy a more than 300-hectare territorial homeland on Long Island surrounded by multimillion-dollar Southampton mansions.

The Guna relocation is being closely watched as a possible template for other threatened communities. What sets the Guna apart from many others is that they have a place to go.

Rising sea levels in Guna Yala

More than 30,000 Indigenous Guna inhabit the province now called Guna Yala, which includes the archipelago once known as San Blas and a strip of mainland. Most live on the islands, traveling back to the mainland to get water from the mouth of the river there, and in some cases to tend crops. Some of the islands sit several meters above average sea level, but the vast majority are uninhabited spits of land with palm trees, many only a meter or less above sea level.

So far, only the residents of Gardi Sugdub are included in the relocation plan.

The Guna people of the islands are sustained by the biodiversity there. The sea, mangroves and nearby mainland forests provide food, medicine and building materials. The men hunt and fish to provide seafood to the best restaurants in Panama City, and agriculture remains part of the economy. Guna communities elect traditional authorities known as sailas (“chiefs” in Guna) and argars (“chief’s spokesmen”), and they hold regular meetings to address community issues.

In recent decades, the Guna have moved toward an economy based on tourism and providing services to outsiders. They earn money supplying food, souvenirs and cultural artifacts to tourists but allow visitors to the islands only with prior approval from the sailas. Outsiders are not permitted to own property or operate businesses.

Carlos Arenas is an international human rights lawyer and an adviser on social and climate justice issues. When he visited Gardi Sugdub in 2014 as a consultant for Displacement Solutions, a nonprofit initiative focused on housing, land and property rights, he was tasked to assess the nascent relocation plans and provide recommendations. He was shocked to see the visible threat posed by the rising sea. “You cannot see much elevation,” Arenas says. “The level of exposure was extremely high, but they don’t see it necessarily that way. They have been living there for more than 170 years.”

Heliodora Murphy grew up on Gardi Sugdub and has watched the ocean rise higher each year. The 52-year-old grandmother doesn’t understand those who dismiss climate change in light of the growing physical evidence all around. Murphy, also speaking through an interpreter, recalls her father bringing rocks and sand from a river on the mainland to shore up pathways and keep their home dry.

Gardi Sugdub resident Pedro Lopez, left, plans to stay on the island, while Heliodora Murphy, right, has already picked out her new home on the mainland.COURTESY OF IVETTE N. ROGERS

Arenas says that some families face a daily struggle against the ocean. They build barriers that are immediately destroyed and have to be built again.

Some of the stopgap measures have been counterproductive, like filling in coral reefs to expand the land area. Reefs are a natural buffer against wave action, storm surges, flooding and erosion. Destroying them has only added to the peril.

Today, Murphy says, storm surges carry water into her small, ground-level home. “It’s very different than in the past,” she says. “The waves are so much higher now.” About two years ago, she decided she’d move with her family. “We can’t stay here.”

A history of autonomy

Historically, the Guna have had a level of autonomy rare among Indigenous people. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in what is now Colombia and Panama, the Guna lived primarily near the Gulf of Urabá on the northern coast of Colombia. The two groups clashed violently, prompting the Guna to abandon the coastal border area and move north into the jungle of Panama near the Caribbean. By the mid-1800s, entire villages had relocated again, this time to the San Blas archipelago.

Panama declared its independence from Spain in 1821 and became a part of Gran Colombia. Throughout the 19th century, the Guna lived independently according to their customs. That changed in 1903 when Panama broke from Colombia. The new nation attempted to assimilate the people living on the archipelago.

But having escaped Spanish rule centuries earlier and avoided Colombian authority as well, the Guna resisted Panama’s acculturation efforts. When the Guna couldn’t achieve détente through other means, they launched an armed attack against the Panamanians in February 1925.

The United States, having occupied the Panama Canal Zone since 1903, had geopolitical interests in the region and threw its support behind the Guna. That support forced the Panamanian government into a negotiated peace that allowed the Guna to continue their way of life. In 1938, the Guna islands and adjacent coastline were recognized as a semiautonomous Indigenous territory, Guna Yala. The Guna have maintained control of that territory since.

The Guna find a new home

The Gardi Sugdub residents first broached the idea of relocation in 2010. “They basically ran out of room,” Oliver-Smith says.

He describes the Guna as the Indigenous people in Latin America who have been perhaps most successful in defending their cultural heritage, language and territory. They initiated the plans for resettlement and made arrangements among themselves to set aside 17 hectares of property on the mainland for these purposes. The land, within the Guna Yala territory, is near a school and health center being built by the Panamanian government.

The residents of Gardi Sugdub (the island is shown here in 2014) face overcrowding and rising seas. More than a decade ago, they initiated a plan to move more than 300 families to a new community on the mainland.ARNULFO FRANCO/AP PHOTO

When Guna leaders approached the government, the Ministry of Housing initially promised to build 50 houses on the parcel. But it remained just that — a promise — until around 2014, when the Guna began to speak publicly about their situation. News of their predicament caught the attention of Indigenous rights organizations and eventually Displacement Solutions, which turned to Arenas and Oliver-Smith to evaluate the situation and offer recommendations about the best way forward.

Following Displacement Solutions’ first report in 2014, Panama’s Ministry of Housing agreed to build 300 houses, along with the hospital and school. But Arenas, who until the COVID-19 pandemic started had visited Guna Yala every year or so, says progress remained slow, causing the Guna to question Panama’s commitment to the relocation. The Guna leveraged support from international groups and members of the Panamanian government to get the project moving. “They were the originators of the idea of resettlement,” Oliver-Smith says. “And they kept it alive.”

Arenas estimates that roughly 200 of the 300 houses in the new community are complete. The cost for the houses, which are being paid for by the Panamanian government, exceeds $10 million, and the Inter-American Development Bank has invested $800,000 in technical assistance. The new homes will have cement floors, bamboo walls, zinc roofs, running water and full electrification.

Before plans to relocate began, many Guna had already moved to cities including Panama City and Colón for school, work or simply to have more room. Arenas expects that many more people already living in mainland Panama will likely join their families in the new community. People on other Guna Yala islands will likely have to move eventually too.

Murphy has already picked out her two-bedroom home for her small nuclear family of seven. Two daughters moved to Panama City years ago, and she hopes to see them more. But at around 40 square meters, the homes may not accommodate the typical multigenerational, double-digit Guna families. Lopez plans to stay on the island, letting the younger generations live in the family’s new home on the mainland.

The Guna hope to retain their traditional customs through the move, including handiwork called wini and molas (examples shown).DIXON HAMBY/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES PLUS

To ensure that the ethnic and cultural identities they fought to preserve are not lost in the move, the Guna plan to develop programs to teach traditions and culture to the resettled generations. But even on Gardi Sugdub, younger generations seem less inclined to practice the traditional customs — like making and wearing wini (vibrantly colored beads worn around the arms and legs) and molas (intricately designed fabric dresses that have become a symbol of Guna life and resistance to colonialism). Murphy began learning the craft when she was 6 years old. She spends two months constructing each ensemble, which she sells to tourists for $80.

Oliver-Smith is optimistic about the relocation plan but worries that the Panamanian government has repeated some mistakes that have doomed projects elsewhere by treating resettlement solely as a housing issue. “You don’t just pick people up and move them from point A to point B. It is a reconfiguring of a life of a people,” Oliver-Smith says. “It has political, social, economic, environmental, spiritual and cultural dimensions.”

As is often the case when Indigenous and rural communities relocate, Arenas says, the government failed to make the Guna equal participants in the design concept. “The Panamanian government is trying to build a Panama City neighborhood in the middle of a tropical forest,” he says. “They have not tried to save a single tree of this beautiful landscape…. They removed everything. They tried to flatten the land because it’s cheaper…. It’s also extremely hot there, and the building materials are hot.” This increases the risk of failure, he says, because the houses don’t match the environment.

But Murphy hopes everything will be better. The new village promises dry land and more space. And perhaps returning to the mainland the Guna occupied nearly 150 years ago will lead to a stronger connection to Guna historical culture and traditions.

Oliver-Smith says the Guna are facing the challenge of resettlement with an intact culture and language that he hopes will be a basis for maintaining cultural continuity. His time spent with the Guna has convinced him that, as disruptive and devastating as resettlement can be, the Guna relocating as a cohesive group are perhaps best equipped to emerge intact even if not unscathed.

“Carlos [Arenas] and I asked an old, retired saila if he thought resettlement would change the Guna,” he says. “He said, ‘No. Individuals may change out of choice, but our culture is eternal. It will never die.’ ” More

Baseball is the best sport in the world for numberphiles. There are so many stats collected that the analysis of them even has its own name: sabermetrics. Like in Moneyball, team managers, coaches and players use these statistics in game strategy, but the mountain of available data can also be put to other uses.

Researchers have now mined baseball’s number hoard to show that climate change caused more than 500 home runs since 2010, with higher air temperatures contributing to the sport’s ongoing home run heyday. The results appear April 7 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Many factors have led to players hitting it out of the park more often in the last 40 years, from steroid use to the height of the stitches on the ball. Blog posts and news stories have also speculated about whether climate change could be increasing the number of home runs, says Christopher Callahan of Dartmouth College (SN: 3/10/22). “But nobody had quantitatively investigated it.”

A climate change researcher and baseball fan, Callahan decided to dig into the sport’s mound of data in his free time to answer the question. After he gave a brief presentation at Dartmouth on the topic, two researchers from different fields joined the project.

That collaboration produced an analysis that is methodologically sound and “does what it says,” says Madeleine Orr, a researcher of the impacts of climate change on sports at Loughborough University London, who was not involved with the study.

The theorized relationship between global warming and home runs stems from fundamental physics — the ideal gas law says as temperature goes up, air density goes down, reducing air resistance. To see if home runs were happening due to warming, Callahan and colleagues took several approaches.

First, the team looked for an effect at the game level. Across more than 100,000 MLB games, the researchers found that a 1-degree Celsius increase in the daily high temperature increased the number of home runs in a game by nearly 2 percent. For example, a game like the one on June 10, 2019, where the Arizona Diamondbacks and Philadelphia Phillies set the record for most home runs in a game, would be expected to have 14 home runs instead of 13 if it were 4 degrees C warmer.

The researchers then ran game-day temperatures through a climate model that controls for greenhouse gas emissions and found that human-caused warming led to an average of 58 more home runs each season from 2010 to 2019. The analysis also showed that the overall trend of more home runs in higher temperatures goes back to the 1960s.

The team followed that analysis with a look at more than 220,000 individual batted balls, made possible by the Statcast system — where high-speed cameras have tracked the trajectory and speed of every ball hit during a game since 2015. The researchers compared balls hit in almost exactly the same way on days with different temperatures, while controlling for other factors like wind speed and humidity. That analysis showed a similar increase in home runs per degree Celsius as the game-level analysis, with only lower air density due to higher temperatures left to explain higher numbers of home runs.

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While climate change has “not been the dominant effect” causing more home runs, “if we continue to emit greenhouse gases strongly, we could see much more rapid increases in home runs” moving forward, Callahan says.

Some fans feel that the prevalence of home runs has made baseball duller, and it’s at least part of the reason that the MLB unveiled several new rule changes for the 2023 season, Callahan says.

Teams can adapt to rising temperatures by shifting day games to night games and adding domes to stadiums — the researchers found no effect of temperature on home runs for games played under a dome. But according to Orr, climate change may soon cause even more dramatic changes to America’s pastime, even with those adaptations.

Because the sport is susceptible to snow, storms, wildfires, flooding and heat at various points during the season, Orr says, “I don’t think, without substantial change, baseball exists in the current model” within 30 years.

Callahan agrees. “This sport, and all sports, are going to see major changes in ways that we cannot anticipate.” More