abelardo “tito” nuñez davies first came to pelican island 15 years ago. it was much larger then.

the small hut he and his mother share started out in the middle of this tiny oasis of sand. now, the structure sits at the edge of the waves on the island’s eastern shore, amid a cluster of palm trees. the ocean laps at their doorstep. but the building never moved; the island shrank.

over the past decade or so, storms have slowly been washing the sand away. davies has seen parts of the island flood and the beach begin to disappear. the storms, he said, are getting stronger and stronger. 

last year’s particularly fierce hurricane season didn’t directly impact the area, but pelican island still endured the effects. “the storm was soft,” davies said. “but it was still very scary. the whole house was flooded and it destroyed the wall.”

“what can i say? we’re here because of the grace of god,” davies said. despite the increasing threat of storms, he said he and his mother have no plans to relocate. they make money for their family by welcoming tourists, who visit the picturesque stretch of sand for a few hours at a time to sunbathe and drink out of coconuts. pelican island receives boats of them daily.

to combat the flooding, davies and his mother are attempting to build a sea wall off the island’s western shore, which may destroy the encircling coral reef in the process. but they don’t want to risk losing their island, which provides them with significant income.

does he think the storms will get less intense as time goes on? davies replied with a spanish tenet: “ojala” — god willing.

rising tides

pelican island is just one of more than 350 islands in the san blas archipelago, part of the caribbean province of guna yala (pronounced “koona yahlah”) along the northern coast of panama. widely regarded as some of the most beautiful and pristine in the world, some 50 of these islands are home to the guna people, an indigenous group that has won the rights to self-govern this area and a strip of the mainland coast.

the guna arrived to panama and these islands in canoes from the northern coast of colombia after the arrival of the spanish in the 1500s, fleeing colonization. since then, they have developed a relationship with the islands as well as their territory on land.

“i grew up in an environment of socialism,” said diwigdi valiente, a guna environmental advocate who grew up on these islands. “within my community, everything was shared. there were people that used to go fishing, there were people that used to go hunting, there were people that used to go farming, and then at the end of the day they would all come back and share everything they had with the people on the island.”

valiente has been visiting pelican island for years, and he said it’s shrunk to half its original size over his lifetime.

the san blas are on the front lines of climate change. scientists at the smithsonian tropical research institute in panama estimate that sea levels are rising three quarters of an inch every year, accelerating from the conservative 3 millimeter estimate first released by the u.n.’s intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc). at this rate, most of the islands could be underwater in less than 30 years. it’s a similar story in island countries and coastal cities around the world, from kiribati to dhaka.

“if there is a storm here, there could be islands that will completely vanish,” valiente said. “there are months when the islands get completely flooded. you have water up to your ankles. imagine living for a month like that.”

heating up

pelican island’s peril begins thousands of miles away, in the industrialized areas of the world. here, greenhouse gases — emitted mainly from fossil fuels — spread like a blanket across the globe and trap heat. scientists tout the “greenhouse effect” as the cause for global warming: it caused the warming of the earth following the last ice age, which supported life on the planet as we know it, but massive fossil fuel emissions since the industrial revolution have accelerated greenhouse gas levels to a dangerous peak. 

when light energy from the sun travels to the earth, it passes through greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (namely carbon dioxide and methane), originally derived from natural processes like decomposition and respiration in organisms. some of this light energy is reflected back into space, while some is contained by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. this trapped light energy contains heat that creates a warming effect that raises the temperature of the planet. without this layer of gases, earth would be far too cold for life to sustain itself.

but once humans began burning fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas made from previously decomposed organic material — during the industrial revolution, the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere dramatically increased. these emissions collected in the atmosphere, raising levels of carbon dioxide. the atmosphere, in turn, trapped more light energy and radiated more heat back onto the earth’s surface. this has caused the average global temperature to increase at a rapid pace — something never before encountered during the existence of humans on this planet.

as the planet warms, ice sheets in places like greenland and antarctica and sea ice in the polar regions, begin to melt. massive chunks of glaciers break off into the sea at alarming rates, melting and causing sea levels to rise.

additionally, atmospheric heat and absorbed carbon dioxide cause thermal expansion in the oceans. water particles become energized and take up more space, again accelerating sea level rise. 

moreover, a warming ocean sustains more intense storm systems such as hurricanes (as we’ve recently seen with increasingly brutal hurricane seasons). tiny islands like the san blas are ravaged by these storms, which uproot trees with strong winds and flood beaches with storm surge.

climate refugees

some guna people don’t appreciate the severity of the situation, said valiente, particularly older generations, like davies and his mother, who don’t have access to information about climate change and rising sea levels.

“you try to explain (to) people climate change, and they don’t understand it because they are not causing it,” valiente said. “the worst thing about climate change is that people in need — people that are not making the problem — are the ones that are going to suffer the most. everywhere. not only in panama, not only with the gunas — everywhere.”

but valiente is doing work to combat that lack of knowledge with a project called burwigan, leading art projects for guna children about environmental issues that affect them directly.

“we would make fish sculptures. we are putting the fish at different levels around the houses to show them where the sea level will be in the next couple of years,” he said. “i’m working with the kids because what they see now, it’s normal to them. to me, it’s not normal at all.”

valiente said that while moving is inevitable, plans for a mass relocation to the guna mainland territory several years ago never materialized due to a change in government. 

“we have (one of) the first documented cases of an indigenous group forced to move because of climate change,” valiente said, in “a country that did not contribute to climate change at all.”

life on the sun-drenched isles of south florida can be breathtaking. miami boasts some of the most vibrant coastlines in the nation; crystalline ocean waters, brimming with life and home to some of the most remarkable biomes on earth, lap gently against bone-white shores. for me, miami is the perfect oasis. if only i could forget one little problem: we. are. sinking.

the atlantic ocean is marching upon us. environmental protection agency reports state that from 1996 to 2011, we’ve lost 20 square miles of coastline to the sea. the very same glistening waters that we floridians so love to admire have begun a seemingly unstoppable tirade against us. so, what are we going to do? where do we turn? who is going to ‘save our souls’?

we can’t count on the powerful developers who run the place. they’re doing better business than ever. the miami coastline is booming; the city is dotted with engineers and construction crews who swarm their work-sites like ants. hundreds of steel and glass towers crowd the narrow strip of land, each one taller than the last and all of them vying to be closest to god.

we can’t count on our elected officials. even when faced with daily floods and the sobering aftermath of hurricane irma, florida governor rick scott — the man who banned the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” from his administration’s vocabulary — still refuses to deal with the watery grave that he’s condemning our city to.

as it turns out, we’re going to have to save ourselves. all over the state, university students and educators are answering the call-to-arms. they’re researching, collaborating with the city of miami beach and working towards implementing substantive solutions. essentially, they are fighting back.

they are fighting back not just against the incoming tides but also against the seemingly endless inaction from those who are supposed to be in power. florida international university’s sea level solutions center (slsc) is leading the charge. the center was founded in 2015 with the vision of creating and implementing sustainable solutions for sea level rising.

in under two years, slsc had netted together a vast web of collaborators, student scientists and project leaders who work towards making some real changes in south florida. year after year, slsc pushes out newer, more innovative research projects. from a project which outlines the potential dangers of increasing salinity on our natural water systems and drinking water, to a project that aims to stabilize and protect south florida archaeological sites with integrated ecosystem restoration.  these research projects are important because through them the slsc is not only able to gather usable data and implement plans, but they also get the opportunity to educate on the less obvious effects of rising sea levels.

slsc tries to work directly with the community, according to brad schonhoff, a fiu graduate turned project manager.

“[we are] bringing science to the table, and telling what the latest data is showing, informing current zoning and building projects on the data… getting them to implement resilience into the building,” schonhoff said.

slsc works hand in hand with regional bodies to make sure that the plans for this new generation of renovations will be based in science. for example a recent a $400 million dollar general obligation bond was voted on in miami. roughly 200 million dollars of that will be funneled into environmentally focused renovations to the city, this includes; water pumps, sewage restructuring and raised roads. in situations like these, slsc takes the research they’ve painstakingly gathered and presents it to those who are charged with rebuilding our cities.

while this collaboration between the city of miami beach and the university’s research center is enough to give us hope for the future, we know that water pumps and high-roads are not exactly permanent fixes. we cannot build high enough, nor can we pump back out enough water to escape the forward march of the rising seas.

dear readers, i’m going to level with you. we know there is only one real solution to this problem. and floridians are counting on you – yes, i mean you! – to help us out on this one.

although we’re facing the immediate effects of rising sea-levels, this is a truly international issue. if we, as a united international community, could come together to do something about the adverse effects of global warming, melting glaciers wouldn’t be flooding into our coastal cities.

miami needs you, all of you, to join the fight. for our sake. this is our s.o.s. call, because at the rate we’re going, this beautiful, blossoming, slice of tropical paradise won’t be here for much longer.

from florida, with love.

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