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Abandoned houses, forsaken businesses, clubs standing in ruins. This is not an earthquake-hit town, nor a tsunami. A much slower, but equally destructive force is at work on the coastline of Cedeno, a fishing village in southern Honduras – like it is on other villages on the Pacific Gulf of Fonseca: sea level rise. The creeping ocean has claimed ever more of the protective mangrove forest off Cedeno s coast, and claws away at the land with increasingly violent sea surges.
Inhabitants of Cedeno and other fishing villages on the Gulf of Fonseca – shared by Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua – are at the forefront of one of the more visible symptoms of climate change: sea level rise caused by melting glaciers and ice sheets. "The sea is advancing," said Telma Yadira Flores, a 40-year-old homemaker from Cedeno who lost her house in a storm surge last year and now lives in a rickety shack with her son and daughter-in-law. The sandy beach is their kitchen floor. "If the sea comes again, we will have to move. We will have to see where," Flores told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
According to the NGO Coddeffagolf (Committee for the Defense and Development of the Flora and Fauna of the Gulf of Fonseca), the sea has advanced 105 meters (344 feet) into Cedeno, a settlement of some 7,000 people, in 17 years. Apart from numerous homes and small businesses, a marine laboratory, police headquarters and a park were also abandoned to the waves. The Michel Hasbun primary school, which once served about 400 children, now stands empty. "There was a soccer field, it was lost," Sergio Espinal, a 75-year-old fisherman, told AFP, pointing to where it once stood. "There were good restaurants, good hotels... ." But no more.
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