Story

El Salvador’s Vanishing Coast

June 01, 2012 | Pulitzer Center
By
Simeon Tegel, for the Pulitzer Center

Local people earn less than $4 a day by collecting “punche” crab at low tide from this mangrove forest in El Salvador’s Bajo Lempa region. Image by Simeon Tegel. El Salvador, 2012.

A few hundred yards away, the dead skeletons of mangrove trees jut from the encroaching sand, pushed forward at a rate of about 45 yards a year by the rising Pacific Ocean. Image by Simeon Tegel. El Salvador, 2012.

Stumps are all that remain of the mangrove forest as the ocean sweeps in. In 2005, the mangroves reached out 1,000ft into what is now the Pacific Ocean. Image by Simeon Tegel. El Salvador, 2012.

A dying way of life, Nahun Diaz, 26, shows the club he uses to push holes into the soft mud in the mangroves to catch the “punche” crab by hand. Image by Simeon Tegel. El Salvador, 2012.

During one storm in 2011, locals say, the water rose to within a couple of feet of this bridge across the Lempa River. Image by Simeon Tegel. El Salvador, 2012.

Subsistence farmer Herminia Arqueta in front of her house beside the Lempa River. Up to two feet of water enters the house almost annually as the river swells from increasingly-frequent extreme storms. Image by Simeon Tegel. El Salvador, 2012.

Few countries are as vulnerable to climate change as El Salvador. In the Americas, only Haiti has seen more widespread deforestation. El Salvador’s ravaged watersheds are unable to cope with the extreme storms that increasingly batter Central America, leading to devastating floods downriver that now occur almost yearly. Meanwhile, rising seas are expected to swallow up between 10 percent and 28 percent of its coastal lands. That process has already started in the mangrove forests of the Bajo Lempa, which are slowly being overtaken by the Pacific’s crashing waves, potentially turning local people who eke out a living collecting crabs in the mangroves into climate refugees.