by Jorge Madrid

The public transportation system in Medellin, Colombia, is one of the most successful in the world. It is successful for promoting not just environmental sustainability, but social equity as well.

In 2012, it was named one of the top transport systems in the world by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a global consortium of organizations founded in 1985 to promote sustainable transportation worldwide:

“The city [of Medillin] transformed violence and despair into hope and opportunity, using sustainable transport as one of the key levers to drive change,” said ITDP board member Holger Dalkmann.

The crown jewel of the city’s transportation system is the Metro de Medellín, a network of clean and efficient metro cars that serves over half a million (553,000) passengers every day.  This project was financed by a public-private partnership led by the city; construction took ten years, with the last major expansion completed in 2006.  The system saves 175,000 tons of C02 every year, the equivalent of planting 380,000 trees that would occupy 11% of the city’s land mass.  Metro calculates that it saves the city $1.5 billion in respiratory health costs every year, and $4 billion in reduced traffic accidents and congestion.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of the metro system is the world renowned metro cablé system, a network of 9 cable car systems that take passengers up steep mountainsides that line the Valley of Medellin.  The lines were completed in 2010 with plans for future expansion.  The metro cable system has revolutionized mobility and accessibility for residents of Colombia’s second largest city, particularly the poorest — and often most violent — communities that line the valley of Medellin’s mountainous region.

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Our guest blogger is Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Program Manager, Refugees International. In May, 2011, Alice wrote how the extreme floods of Colombia were devastating the nation. This post describes Colombia’s continued fight for survival in our poisoned climate.

As we approach the town of Manatí, in northern Colombia, I look eagerly out the window for signs of change. When I was here almost a year ago, makeshift shelters and tents lined the sides of the road. Random pieces of furniture were piled nearby: a refrigerator or a rocking chair – anything people could save from the floodwaters.

Today the tents are gone. But just outside of town, we turn off the road and into a lot, where temporary shelters made of fiberboard and corrugated metal have been constructed. I see Irida emerge from one of them. Smiling and laughing, we embrace each other.

Irida is one of approximately 225,000 people who were affected when unprecedented rains in the fall of 2010 caused the nearby Dique Canal to rupture. The break in the canal, which connects Colombia’s coastal city of Cartagena to the Magdalena River, submerged half of the northern state of Atlántico under 80 million cubic meters of water. When I first visited Manatí in March 2011, half of the town was still underwater, and Irida was living under plastic sheeting after being evicted from the local school. Irida’s house, which she showed me by canoe, had water up to the rooftop.

To some extent, Irida was lucky. Hers was one of the first families in the town able to move into these temporary shelters last April. In many of the nearby towns we have visited, they were not completed until three months ago.

But the shelter where Irida now lives was designed to last only three months. She has been there for almost a year. Worse than that, the floodwaters have still not dissipated, and her house is still flooded. According to the state governor’s office, 60 percent of the area that flooded when the Dique Canal burst in 2010 is still underwater today. Pumping has proven ineffective because much of this area was once wetland and is now returning to its natural state. So Irida and the roughly 600 other families in Manatí who’ve lost their homes are now being told they will have to relocate.

The day after our reunion with Irida, we join a town hall meeting where the governor tells a schoolyard full of flood-affected families that his priority is to find land and build homes for the thousands still displaced more than a year later. But Irida tells me that she doesn’t want to take the piece of land being offered. It is too far away from the center of town, she says. Before the floods, she ran a small grocery shop out of her house. If she relocates, she will be unable to restart her business and will be isolated from her community.

Like so many other Colombians we are meeting on this trip, Irida is quick to smile and laugh. But the pain and anxiety are nevertheless visible on her face. Beyond the relocation troubles, she has many more immediate worries. The toilets at her temporary shelter do not work, and two of the plastic water tanks have recently ruptured in the heat. The Colombian government discontinued food deliveries to the area in November. Her husband has been unable to find work. Without permanent homes or work, how can the process of recovery even begin?

I am at a loss for words as we say our goodbyes. I hope things will be better for Irida the next time we meet; I wish I could be more certain.

Our guest blogger is Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Program Manager at Refugees International.

Unprecedented rain that has hammered Colombia over the past year has affected three million people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. In March, I spent three weeks traveling across the Caribbean region visiting families displaced by the floods. The alarming conditions I encountered more than three months since President Santos declared a state of emergency are described in a new report by Refugees International entitled, “Surviving Alone: Improving Assistance to Colombia’s Flood Victims.”

In the town of Manatí in Atlántico Department I was greeted by the Iraida, an Afro-Colombian mother of four who leads a local women’s organization. “Today we don’t have a glass of water to drink,” Iraida tells me. “The water truck has not come to distribute water. It comes every eight days.” She explains that water rations are not sufficient to allow her to bathe her baby and provide enough water for the other four members of her family.

Watch a personal account from Iraida and her husband:

Iraida points to her house, which is submerged except for the tops of the windows and roof. “We had a store, a business. We took out a loan and now we are unable to pay the bank. We need food, water, clothes – yes, even clothes because we have lost everything.”

Tragically, her story was similar to dozens of others I heard in Atlántico, Córdoba, Bolívar, Sucre and Magdelana Departments. Flood victims received some basic aid during the height of the floods in December; many had been encouraged by news that the government had launched a multi-media campaign to raise flood aid. But more than three months later, what little assistance they had received was tapering off, leaving them to survive on their own. As described in the report, an uncoordinated, bureaucratic process set up by the Colombian government to distribute millions of dollars in flood relief was severely hindering the provision of emergency humanitarian assistance. According to a recent report by the Colombian General Accountability Office, only half of the flood aid has been distributed to date.

In 2010 alone, 300 million people across the globe were affected by natural disasters, the majority of which were climate-related, including 182 floods that affected 180 million people — almost double the annual average for the last decade. Read more