This story was produced by Drilled, a global multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability, and is co-published with Grist.
It’s 3 a.m. and the beach in El Bosque, in southeast Mexico, is humming with small talk and laughter as Viviana Velázquez eases out of her hammock and dashes to the shoreline to greet a boat returning with the night’s catch. Velázquez, 38, and her 13-year-old daughter, Marlene, help the tired fishermen unload the ice boxes and heave a plastic crate full of bonito to the cooperative to be weighed.
The captain pays Velázquez for her help in fish. She saves a couple to fry for breakfast and cashes in the rest for 50 pesos, the equivalent of about $3, and heads back to her hammock, where some friends are eating pastries while catching up on the past week’s dramas.
This work is known locally as garrulear. For decades it was an important source of income, food, and bonding for women in El Bosque, a small fishing community in the state of Tabasco located on a narrow peninsula sandwiched between the Gulf of Mexico and the Usumacinta River. It is one of the things that Velázquez misses most since sea level rise forced residents to leave.
“In El Bosque I would garrulear every day, but then the sea took everything,” said Velázquez, as she settled back into a hammock. “Now I’m stuck inside most of the time; it’s too far to come here often.”
El Bosque became the first community in Mexico to be recognized as displaced by climate change in 2023. By then, coastal erosion and flooding from storm surge had already damaged or swept away more than half of the hundred or so homes in the area. After a high-profile media campaign and several administrative claims by a coalition of environmental justice organizations working with residents of El Bosque, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador pledged to relocate them.
In November 2024, a new neighborhood called Nuevo Bosque, or New Forest, was inaugurated 7.5 miles inland on the outskirts of the city of Frontera. Fifty-one families received identical purpose-built houses in Nuevo Bosque.
The El Bosque relocation was seen as a huge win for the residents and a success story for the government. Yet two years on, the community is now also struggling to adapt to economic, social, and cultural losses caused by moving away from the sea. Meanwhile, the residents who were excluded from the relocation still don’t know why.
Velázquez was among the lucky ones to be rehoused, but she doesn’t feel settled. “I am trying to adapt to my new life, but I can’t sleep, I cry all the time, my heart beats a thousand times a minute,” she told Drilled. “We’re constantly worrying about money. I eat and eat and eat to calm my nerves. I’ve put on 29 pounds.
“We are grateful, but I am still grieving,” she said. “I miss everything about El Bosque: the cool breeze, my friends, our whole life.”
Fishing wasn’t just a job for the people of El Bosque. It was a core part of who they were, both as individuals and as a community. They wanted to be relocated closer to the coast so they could still fish every day, but the authorities said that they’d likely be flooded out again within a few years. Here, they should be safe from flooding for 30 years or so.
Daniele Volpe
The grief is not over yet. A taxi ride from Nuevo Bosque to El Bosque and back costs 240 pesos (equivalent to around $14), which is why Velázquez and her friends only go back once a week or so even during the height of the fishing season. But even these precious few nights spent garruleando, helping the fishermen and bonding with friends, are numbered.
“At the rate things are going, a few sandy islands are all that will soon be left of El Bosque,” said Lilia Gama, an ecologist and expert in coastal erosion from the Juarez Autonomous University of Tabasco. “The river and the sea will likely join up within a decade, and the entire community will be under water.”
According to Gama, the river and sea in El Bosque would have eventually joined anyway, due to the natural dynamics of the waters, but climate change has turbocharged the process.
Rising sea level is primarily caused by global heating driven by the greenhouse gas emissions released from burning fossil fuels. Ice caps, ice sheets, and glaciers that flow into the oceans are melting, increasing the volume of oceans across the globe. The oceans are also expanding due to warmer waters, which are not only making seas rise further but also causing storms to grow stronger and more destructive. Powerful tidal waves, storm surges, and other events that create extremely high sea levels, which historically occurred once every century, could become annual phenomena by 2100.
Globally, the rate of sea level rise has more than doubled over the past three decades. It will rise a further 15 to 30 centimeters (4 to 12 inches) on average by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, endangering close to a billion people currently living in low-lying coastal areas.
It could leave up to half the entire state of Tabasco, home to about 2.5 million people, uninhabitable or highly vulnerable by the end of the century, according to modeling by Climate Central.
Under international law, states have a duty to protect their communities and guarantee human rights, which includes transitioning away from fossil fuels and implementing climate adaptation measures to minimize harm.
“If displacement cannot be prevented, communities have the right to be consulted, the right to information, and to provide input so they co-shape the decision on how and where they will be relocated,” said Veronika Fikfak, a professor of international human rights law at University College London.
From El Bosque to Nuevo Bosque
El Bosque was founded in the early 1980s by landless people from the neighboring state of Veracruz who saw an opportunity to lift their families out of poverty. Back then the peninsula was covered in mangroves and thick vegetation — hence the name El Bosque, which means “the forest.”
Velázquez was just six months old when her family moved to El Bosque. The family didn’t get rich, but they did alright. There was an abundance of fish that sold to restaurants and markets in the capital, Mexico City, and then locally as El Bosque became a popular spot for local tourists to eat crab tamales, ceviche, and fish empanadas.
Velázquez married a local fisherman, Javier Rodriguez, and they had two children.
In February 2022, the sea flooded their home during a storm, and the family moved into another house slightly farther inland. When that house flooded in November 2022, they were evacuated to Frontera. By then, an entire row of houses in El Bosque was fully submerged under water, and the kindergarten and primary school their children attended had been abandoned.
Daniele Volpe
Before being evacuated, “the children were crying all the time, scared by the sound of the waves crashing into the house,” Velázquez said. “But we came back to El Bosque so my husband, Javier, could keep fishing.” They stayed in a makeshift house cobbled together from sticks and metal sheeting, even after the power was cut off due to storm damage. “I couldn’t bear to leave.”
The family finally left El Bosque for good on New Year’s Eve 2024, a month after getting the keys to their new house in Nuevo Bosque.
Nuevo Bosque consists of four rows of identical single-story, two-bedroom houses, each with a back and front yard that are too small for the chickens and ducks many raised in El Bosque. There’s a playground, a basketball court, and some benches — the town’s only gathering place, where teenagers make out and community meetings are held.
The town was inaugurated without running water or a primary school. A narrow laminate static trailer parked at the community entrance currently serves as a makeshift classroom. There’s no bathroom, so the kids run home if they need the toilet.
One day in late May when Drilled visited the school in Nuevo Bosque, the morning began with children helping to sweep rainwater from an overnight storm out of the trailer. With no AC and just four fans (one of them broken), soon it was baking hot inside. Tabasco has always been hot and humid, but climate change is driving temperatures higher, and the state education department had just instructed schools to close at 11:30 a.m. for the rest of the term because of the heat.
“The kids get irritable and sleepy. It’s so hot, it’s hard even for me,” said teacher Isabel Mayo Cerino. “This was supposedly a planned relocation, and yet nobody thought about education. A community without a school isn’t a proper community.”
The state education department has promised to build a proper classroom when the community finds some suitable land. But the children have been without a proper school for almost six years now, ever since a tidal wave flooded their old school in El Bosque in late 2020.
Natali Segura, 28, moved her 11-year-old son to a school in Frontera because he could barely read or write. “The kids lost 5 or 6 years of school,” said Segura. “They are so behind.”
The community is relieved to be away from the threat of the rising sea, and close proximity to the city has brought benefits. A hospital is nearby, and there’s good internet and phone service, which the teenagers love.
But multiple residents told Drilled that they feel isolated and less healthy. Drilled met many adults and children who, like Velázquez, said they had put on significant amounts of weight since relocating away from the coast. Their life in the city is far more sedentary. Fish is no longer a mainstay of their diet, and fast food is a lot easier to find. Residents have gotten into the habit of ordering snacks and big bottles of sugary, fizzy drinks for home delivery.
At the same time, money is tighter, and for the first time mothers don’t always know where the next meal for their kids is coming from.
Daniele Volpe
“It might look like we’re better off in these new houses, but we’re not,” said Áurea Sánchez, 44, who spends hours each day at her evangelical church praying for the community to be blessed. “No one was rich in El Bosque, but no one ever went hungry. Now, life is more precarious. We’re fishers, we can’t change overnight.”
In 2024, Sánchez and her eldest daughter, Yesenia, were among hundreds of people from frontline communities in Latin America and the Caribbean who testified at a landmark hearing on climate displacement convened by the Inter American Court of Human Rights, or IACHR, in Manaus, Brazil. “I realized that we’re not alone, that we have rights, and that many communities are suffering because we haven’t looked after what God gave us,” Sanchez told Drilled.
El Bosque has become an emblematic case of climate displacement, helping clarify international law and setting in motion a wave of policy reforms in Mexico. It was cited in a historic opinion published by the IACHR in May 2025.
“States are obligated to adopt measures to prevent … migration and forced displacement resulting directly and indirectly from disasters and other impacts of climate change,” according to the IACHR advisory opinion on human rights and climate change. In other words, the highest court in the Americas says that under existing international law, states are duty bound to develop and finance public policies on climate adaptation and displacement.
Where oil production and displacement converge
International climate negotiations are often cast in terms of those who have contributed the most to climate change and those who will suffer the worst consequences. Mexico is one of the few countries that straddles both categories.
Mexico is one of the top 20 largest historic contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Industrialized countries that benefited most from fossil fuels are legally and morally bound to help lead the way in transitioning away from fossil fuel under international law and U.N. climate treaties like the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Yet Mexico is the 11th largest oil producer in the world, according to the International Energy Agency’s most recent data. It is also highly vulnerable to climate breakdown. If current climate trends continue, Mexico could see at least 3 million people internally displaced by 2050 as a result of sea level rise, drought, desertification, extreme heat, and other sudden and slow onset climate disasters, according to one study by the World Bank.
This paradox is particularly stark in Tabasco, the state where El Bosque is located, which is also the home state of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose six-year term from 2018 to 2024 saw Mexico’s transition to renewable energy sources go backward.
Tabasco is one of the biggest oil-producing states in Mexico, and fossil fuel companies have built refineries, pipelines, and other polluting infrastructure along its eroding coastline, as well as roads, schools, hospitals, and entire neighborhoods for their workers. Sea level rise and air pollution from oil operations threaten them all, underlying the harm caused by fossil fuels at every stage of their life cycle — from toxic pollution and industrial accidents when they are extracted and refined, to the global heating driven by the release of greenhouse gases when they are burned.
Mexico’s national oil company, Pemex, was founded by President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938. A symbol of the country’s nationalism and sovereignty, it’s now ranked as the biggest corporate polluter in Latin America and among the most indebted fossil companies globally.
Daniele Volpe
Tabasco is tightly intertwined with Pemex, which has installations in 80 percent of the state’s municipalities — including the Dos Bocas oil refinery, which opened in 2022 about 60 miles west of El Bosque, and only meters away from a primary school in the neighborhood Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, more colloquially known as La Petrolera (the oil company), because so many residents work for Pemex.
The refinery has suffered floods, fatal fires, and massive oil leaks, while acute respiratory problems, panic attacks, headaches, and vomiting have surged among residents. The neighborhood is dotted with empty houses, all that’s left of the families displaced by the pollution, or who moved away in fear of further industrial disasters.
A huge gas flare is visible from the local hospital near La Petrolera, which is owned and operated by Pemex for its workers and their families, where Cindy Barjau rushed her daughter two years ago after she passed out, overcome by the fumes from the refinery.
“Children can’t play outside anymore; we keep our windows shut,” Barjau told Drilled. “It’s inhumane. Our quality of life has gone. We want to leave, too, but where would we go?”
Pemex has acknowledged a rise in air pollution but has repeatedly claimed that there is no risk to nearby communities. The gravity of the air pollution is difficult to determine, however, because the government has classified its air monitoring data as secret until 2030.
Documents obtained by local media suggest that Pemex began building the facility before completing an environmental impact assessment or a drainage system.
In March, amid growing public pressure following a fire that left five workers dead, President Claudia Sheinbaum asked Pemex to help relocate the school, where enrollment has plummeted.
A 2025 study by Amnesty International revealed that at least 2 billion people — a quarter of the world’s population — live within 3 miles of operational oil, gas, and coal projects, which have turned nearby communities and critical ecosystems into so-called sacrifice zones.
“The fossil fuel industry impacts people’s bodies, their health, their land, and the environment, polluting the surroundings and compromising the ability to sustain life in the short and medium term — and the long term, due to its climate impacts,” said Juan Manuel Orozco, a project officer at the nonprofit group Conexiones Climáticas, which has worked with residents in Dos Bocas and El Bosque. “In the southeast of Mexico, the situation is particularly dramatic. It’s as if all the monsters of our times have converged here.”
International law advances
In July 2025, a historic advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, confirmed that all states, whether they are signatories to the Paris Agreement or not, have a duty to take action to achieve “deep, rapid and sustained” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, which includes regulating private corporations. The continued expansion of fossil fuels would amount to a legal wrong under customary international law, which could trigger an obligation to provide full reparations, the ICJ wrote.
The opinions — along with the El Bosque case — have generated political momentum in Mexico, and there has been more ambition on climate since President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in 2024.
As a signatory to the Paris Agreement, Mexico must submit an updated climate action plan (called a Nationally Determined Contribution) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change every five years. Mexico’s 2025 update set a greenhouse gas target for the first time, implying that it would begin to take steps to lower its emissions.
However, plans are afoot to expand fossil fuel exploration, production, and use, while Mexico’s target timeline for shifting to renewable energy sources is way too slow, according to Climate Action Tracker.
The IACHR and ICJ opinions also helped clarify that states have a duty to safeguard human rights in the context of climate change and put in place adaptation measures to reduce foreseeable harms (which could include things like infrastructure damage and forced displacement). When climate impacts are so advanced that harms have become unavoidable, the courts direct states to cooperate on “loss and damage” claims, including for financial compensation.
Mexico’s updated climate action plan acknowledged, also for the first time, that climate change is already causing loss and damage, which will require reparations to some communities.
Mexico could also end up facing loss and damage claims from other states over its failures to regulate fossil fuel and other polluting corporations and reduce emissions fast enough. But first the government must face domestic lawsuits for failing to protect its own people from foreseeable harms caused by climate change.
Loss and damage
The specific duties states have under international law to tackle sea level rise — and deal with consequences like lost livelihoods and displacement — are still undergoing legal clarification, and El Bosque has been a test case in many ways. In Mexico, the experience, good and bad, is likely to inform future climate policy, while a new lawsuit by El Bosque residents who were excluded from the relocation could help clarify the government’s statutory duties to climate-displaced communities.
Mexico, like dozens of other countries, still has no climate adaptation plan that sets out how it will both protect and prepare its own communities from climate breakdown. This is expected to include measures to prevent or minimize the risk of forced displacement, such as coastal restoration, reforestation, water-capture systems, and flood walls.
In El Bosque, the state failed to implement adaptation measures such as mangrove restoration that could have slowed down the erosion, according to Nora Cabrera, founder of the Mexico City-based law firm Nuestro Futuro, which is representing the residents.
The relocation, while well intentioned, was poorly planned and led to a decline in living standards for many residents, Cabrera said.
“The community has been made more vulnerable by the relocation — a level of regression that speaks to the process of climate injustice,” said Cabrera. “The El Bosque case is clearly one of loss and damage, because conditions for adaptation were never created. This amounts to an omission on the part of the Mexican state … regarding its citizens, its people.”
The first house in El Bosque to be completely destroyed by the waves belonged to fisherman Pablo Cardoza, who lived on the seafront with his wife and three children. In September 2019, a strong northerly wind caused a storm surge, flooding the house with sea water, dead trees, and trash. So Cardoza and his family moved to a rental in Frontera, and he took up open-water line fishing, which requires spending several nights on the water to catch sea bream, amberjack, and red snapper.
The catch is more reliable out at sea, but Cardoza still worries about making rent each month. Fish stocks are down due to warmer ocean temperatures, acidification, coastal erosion, and pollution from Pemex’s offshore oil rigs.
Once the government accepted responsibility for relocating residents, officials conducted a census, held meetings, and collected documents. In the end, 51 families were selected to receive new homes. However, the criteria for inclusion — or exclusion — have never been shared, and residents left out, like Cardoza, have never been told why.
“I missed some meetings because I was out at sea, but it feels really unfair. We were the first to lose our home and livelihoods,” Cardoza said. “I haven’t given up. I hope one day they correct this injustice.”
In July, Nuestro Futuro filed a lawsuit on behalf of Cardoza and six other residents of El Bosque who were not relocated without any explanation. This case, Cabrera said, could end up in the Mexican Supreme Court and prompt a ruling on what obligations the state has to climate-displaced communities.
The Mexican government is worried about the pending surge in climate displacement, which would inevitably add pressure on urban hubs like Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara, where extreme heat and water shortages are already getting worse. A new national policy is in the works for grappling with climate displacement, although it’s unclear when it will be finished, and the Mexican department of environment and natural resources is holding consultations with a wide range of experts on issues such as migration and gender for the separate climate adaptation plan.
If the displacement policy reflects recommendations submitted by residents of El Bosque and climate justice experts, it should make relocation a last resort, and something that is well planned, less traumatic, and more just for the next El Bosque, and the one after that.
In September, the government acknowledged that the vast majority of states and municipalities currently depend on data that is “three to four years out of date” to assess the risk from earthquakes, hurricanes, sea level rise, and other disasters. Funds have been allocated to help all 31 states and Mexico City identify new risks and update prevention efforts, said Laura Velázquez, Mexico’s national coordinator for civil protection.
Urgency is rising to get plans, policies, and financing in place, as climate breakdown accelerates faster than models predicted. “It’s too late for us, but we need a law or a policy to help others,” said Sanchez, the Nuevo Bosque resident who testified at the IACHR hearing in Brazil. “We were the first but we won’t be the last.”
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