Adapting to Climate Change: How USAID is connecting cities to find solutions

USAID has supported city partnerships for more than a decade to encourage peer learning on a variety of topics, most recently climate change. Read this article about a city partnership between La Ceiba, Honduras and Somerville, Massachusetts.

Sitting around a conference table in Somerville, Massachusetts, many heads nodded. “Yes,” these bobbing heads seemed to say, “We have that problem, too. Yes — we, too, are being affected.”

As Oscar Montes, director of the Municipal Office of Environment, discussed the increasing storms, worsening floods and shrinking coastline that his city La Ceiba, Honduras was experiencing due to climate change, he clicked through a number of photos.

Mothers carrying children on their shoulders through flooded streets. Shopkeepers using buckets to empty their markets of water in vain. Satellite images of an eroded coastline. Photos of houses crumbling into the sea.

Coastal cities like La Ceiba, which is home to a quarter of a million people, have always been vulnerable, but the effects of a changing climate are accelerating these threats.

[Read more…]