Antinuclear

The group of thousands grew out of 160 people who gathered at a bus stop in the crime-plagued Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Oct. 12, BBC News explained. News of the plan spread on social media, and, by the next day, the group had reached 1,000 members.

The migrants are heading north for a variety of reasons, from unemployment to violence. But one of the underlying causes is climate change.

“Central America, in general, has had chronic impacts of climate change,” Oxfam Guatemala Country Director Ana María Mendez Libby told Earther.

That’s because of drought and irregular rainfall in something called the Dry Corridor, a region in the lowlands of Central America along the Pacific coast. Migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador has rapidly increased in the past 10 years, which coincides with a period of drought that has cost the three countries around 700,000 acres in corn and bean crops just this year.

A study led by the UN World Food Program found that the drought, rather than violence, was the driving factor causing people to leave the region to seek food and work elsewhere, National Geographic reported.

While scientists still don’t know how much the current drought, driven primarily by an increasingly erratic El Niño cycle, can be blamed on man-made climate change, experts with experience in the region know the current weather patterns are more extreme than in the past. ……… https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-implications-migrant-caravan-2616282125.html