Displaced by climate change: Villagers in Mexico lose homes to sea

FRANCE 24 English

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00:00On El Bosque beach, every day at 6am, the fishing boats return after a night at sea.

00:09There aren't many fishermen now since we had to leave.

00:12Some can afford to come all the way out here, others can't.

00:17Guadalupe and her family still spend most of their time here.

00:21They've made a living from fishing their entire lives.

00:24Their house is one of the last ones standing in the village.

00:28We still feel at home here, even though we've been forced out by the sea and climate change.

00:36El Bosque today is a ghost village, submerged by the tides.

00:41This was my mother's house. She ran a store here for about 30 years.

00:46This was the village's main street. The school bus would arrive and drop off the students here.

00:52Every time there was a wind from the north, it was like a small tsunami.

00:57And when the waves came to a house, they took everything with them.

01:01So people started putting up barricades, sandbags, tyres and so on.

01:06But nothing could stop the advancing sea.

01:12Over the last four years, several NGOs have supported the villagers of El Bosque.

01:16Thanks to this struggle, the government has officially recognised El Bosque's inhabitants

01:21as people displaced by climate change. A first in Mexico.

01:27What we need is for the El Bosque disaster to mark a first step towards putting in place

01:32public policies to deal with the cases of the climate displaced.

01:35It's painful to say, but there will be more and more climate displaced people in Mexico.

01:42In November, almost all the villagers from El Bosque were relocated about 10 kilometres inland.

01:49This is my new home. We have two bedrooms. Our life has been turned upside down.

01:54We lived from fishing. That was our way of life. But for us, this is a new beginning.

02:01According to scientists from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

02:04300 million people will be directly affected by rising sea levels by 2050

02:09unless forceful action is taken to tackle climate change.

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