Category: Concepts & Ideas

“The Choluteca Bridge is a suspension bridge located in Choluteca, Honduras. Originally constructed in 1930, the bridge was rebuilt in 1996. The Honduras government, knowing the bridge was likely to face extreme weather conditions, commissioned some of the best architectural minds in the world to build a bridge that could withstand any hurricane.”

Sure enough, in 1998, Honduras was hit by Hurricane Mitch, a category 5 storm that devastated the Caribbean. … Even though the bridge stood its ground, there was one problem, the storm caused the river to carve a completely new path which no longer ran under the bridge. That’s right, the Choluteca Bridge no longer stood over the river, rendering it essentially useless.”

Source: Why A Honduran Bridge Is A Perfect Metaphor For Disruption (Medium)

Land inequality is directly threatening 1.4 billion of the world’s poorest people, according to a recent report.

New calculations have discovered that disparities in rights and access to land are more than 40 percent higher than previously thought. Just one percent of the world’s largest farms currently operate more than 70 percent of all farmland.

A lack of access and ownership is pushing rural and Indigenous communities off of the land. It is also putting the livelihoods of an estimated 2.5 billion people at risk, the International Land Coalition (ILC) & Oxfam report found.

“Growing inequality is the greatest obstacle to poverty eradication; in countries like Guatemala, extreme inequality costs lives,” says Ana María Mendez, Oxfam’s Guatemala director.

“In rural Guatemala, extreme land inequality undermines the rights and livelihoods of indigenous and small-farmer communities and exacerbates the climate crisis.

Source: Euronews