environment

Rising sea level claims beach, homes

LA PRENSA

playa monagre, los santos1072778

Residents of the seaside community of Santa Ana, in the province of Los Santos, know first-hand the struggle between man and nature.

The Pacific Ocean has swallowed up over a kilometer of the shoreline along the village’s Playa Monagre, covering more than 40 hectares of land, three houses and a coastal road.

Local rancher Iván Gutiérrez said the ocean waters’ steady rise goes back as far as 1969, when the area’s mangroves began to fall to developers, causing large-scale erosion.

Juan Demóstenes Arosemena, another local livestock farmer, explained that during the summers the situation worsens, as strong winds whittle down the area’s few remaining natural sand slopes.

Facing the loss of his pasture land, Arosemena has begun reforesting his property with native trees, whose roots protect the mainland from the powerful sea winds.

Virgilio Ureña, head of watershed management for the Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente (Anam) en Los Santos, said that a mangrove reforestation project is also underway, with the aim of creating a natural curtain alleviate some of the erosion in that area.

Mangroves’ deep root prevent erosion naturally.

A previous attempt to protect the Playa Monagre with a wall of boulders and tires was unsuccessful, said Ureña. When that failed, farmers began to reforest their land. Only time will tell if it will work.

Ureña agreed that marine sand mining over 20 years ago had made the land more susceptible to erosion.