Colombia’s Receding Coastline – Jacobin

A coastline is the interface between the land and the sea, and there the land is always in flux, subject to oceans’ and rivers’ constant ebb and flow. In the near future, due to global warming, the sea level will rise at an accelerated pace, leading to more extreme weather conditions for coastal land, including heavier rainfall, flooding, earthquakes, hurricanes, and typhoons. All of these extreme weather conditions will speed up the erosion of coastal land, a phenomenon that represents a very serious threat to life and property in Colombia.

In Colombia, nearly 8 percent of the population live on or near the coast, and thus any alteration to the coastline directly affects millions of people. On the Caribbean coast, where erosion is the greatest, the earth is being lost to the sea at a frightening clip. In the past few decades, popular beaches have been swept away, small towns have been swallowed up by the sea, and hundreds of families have been forced to flee inland.

Beaches along the Caribbean coast of Colombia have suffered the most dramatic effects of erosion, and many of the most popular white sand beaches of the twentieth century no longer exist. The disappearance of beaches is tragic, but it is only one step in the relentless advance of erosion. With the disappearance of beaches, which provide a natural buffer zone and keep waves from directly impacting the land, inland areas start to crumble.

Due to this widespread, fast-acting erosion, the largest economies on the coast, such as tourism, cattle ranching, and the agro-industries of the region (bananas, palm oil, rubber), have also been affected. At the same time, however, these profitable industries are all part of the problem.

On the Caribbean coast, erosion is caused by global climate events, such as rising sea level that produce larger waves. On the Gulf of Urabá, which curves inland from the Caribbean on the western edge of Colombia next to Panama, however, human factors are mostly to blame for the fact that the sea is encroaching upon the land. Cattle ranches, agro-industry, tourism, and residential expansion all debilitate the earth and speed up the natural forces of erosion of the coast.

Mangroves and forests are natural biological systems that, among other functions, provide resilience to coastal land. When these are destroyed to make room for agro-industries or cattle grazing, the topsoil, without tree roots to anchor it to the ground below, is more easily washed away during flooding or heavy rains. When resold and converted into residential or tourist developments, the land tends to settle under the weight of constructions and becomes even more vulnerable. The erosion process is sped up when sand from beaches is collected to mix into concrete that is used to build new constructions on the edge of the sea, leading to the disappearance of the very beaches that made it attractive to build there in the first place…