Maria Cruz-Vega can sometimes hear the foundation creaking when she’s in bed at night. There are holes in her floor — and her walls — and she prays the blue-tarp roof that covers her home won’t collapse on her and her family. Nearly 30,000 households in Puerto Rico are still living like this, literally without a real roof over their heads, almost two years after Hurricane Maria pummeled the island.
So far, Cruz-Vega has only received about $3,000 from FEMA. She may be able to get more aid soon.
VICE News traveled to Puerto Rico to see what recovery looks like almost two years after Hurricane Maria, just as a new hurricane season is getting started.
On January 24, 2019, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced it is still 2 minutes to midnight, remaining the closest to midnight that the Doomsday Clock has ever been set.
How many millions of people will be forced to leave their homes by 2050? This documentary looks at the so-called hotspots of climate change in the Sahel zone, Indonesia and the Russian Tundra.
Lake Chad in the Sahel zone has already shrunk by 90 percent since the 1960s due to the increasing heat. About 40 million people will be forced to migrate to places where there is enough rainfall. Migration has always existed as a strategy to adapt to a changing environment. But the number of those forced to migrate solely because of climate change has increased dramatically since the 1990s. It is a double injustice: after becoming rich at the expense of the rest of the world, the industrialized countries are now polluting the atmosphere with their emissions and bringing a second misfortune to the inhabitants of the poorer regions. One of them is Mohammed Ibrahim: as Lake Chad got hotter and drier, he decided to go where the temperatures were less extreme and there was still a little water, trekking with his wife, children and 70 camels from Niger to Chad and then further south. The journey lasted several years and many members of his herd died of thirst. Now he and his family are living in a refugee camp: they only have seven camels left. Mohammed is one of many who have left their homelands in the Sahel – not because of conflict and crises, but because of the high temperatures. He’s a real climate refugee.
