Suriname
Climate change impacts
It takes only 117 days for the average Canadian to produce as much greenhouse gases as the average Surinamer will produce over the course of the entire year. Therefore, April 27th (117 days into the year) is "Climate Change Impacts in Suriname Day."
Climate change will have adverse impacts on Suriname’s environment. The coastal ecosystems will have physical and biological characteristic changes, which can result in lost wetlands, loss of biodiversity, shorelines, coral reefs and fisheries. Suriname’s forests, which accounts for 90% of the land cover, face great risk of extreme flooding and therefore forest destruction due to climate change.
Read more in this World Bank article on Climate Change impacts on Coastal Ecosystems.
Story
“Suriname, a small country squeezed between northern Brazil and the Atlantic Ocean, is 90 per cent rain forest. One of the most damaging effects of climate change there is extreme rainfall. Every May for the last three years, in the big rainy season, rivers and creeks have overflowed, flooding houses and fields, ruining crops and threatening starvation.
Maroons (people descended from runaway slaves) and indigenous people live along the rivers and creeks, and they are worried. They voiced their concerns in a workshop in January, asking what to do when the floods were coming.
'We didn’t have a helpful answer for them,' said Iefna Vrede, a development worker from the Saramacca, one of the five Maroon tribes in the forest. 'The government doesn’t have enough resources. So we advise people to look for somewhere better to live. But if they move to higher ground they will have further to walk to the river, a particular problem for the many elderly women.'"
Read more on the views and worries of locals regarding climate change on Suriname’s forests in the International Institute for Environment and Development article, "Keeping the forests we've got".
Add comment