La Niña phenomenon will not have a strong impact between December and March in Central American countries, one of the region’s most vulnerable to disasters due to the effects of climate change, according to a regional expert in Guatemala.
For the moment, La Niña is expected to be light, then there is no concern for this semester because it is a dry season,”
said the executive secretary of the Hydraulic Resources Committee of the Central American Integration System (SICA), Berta Olmedo.
La Niña is a climatic phenomenon that produces the cooling of the waters on the surface of the oceans, the opposite of the effects of El Niño. Both phenomena cause the resurgence of climatic events such as storms or hurricanes.
Olmedo said that November forecasts revealed that the situation is not alarming but that we must follow up on La Niña’s behavior.
The conclusions come after three days of work in the Guatemalan capital to analyze the perspectives of climate change in the region and where the Central American Agricultural Council (CAC) also participated.
Although he estimated that the effects are minimal, some countries such as Panama could register rains in this dry season and affect export crops such as cucumber, melon and watermelon.
According to the Long Term Climate Risk Index, Central America is one of the region’s most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, especially El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, which are among the fifteen most affected countries.