Sea Level Rise: Ahora en Español
Yesterday, SeaLevelRise.org followed in the footsteps of Flood iQ and released a Spanish version of its website: SeaLevelRise.org/es.
SeaLevelRise.org has a fairly straightforward goal: to simplify the risks, causes, and solutions to sea level rise so elected officials are better able to implement widespread solutions to sea level rise. But while our focus has always been on educating elected officials and community leaders, our site provides simple, easy-to-understand information that benefits a wide variety of groups.
As a nonprofit organization in the business of information-decimation, it makes sense to make our information accessible to as many people as possible — and in the United States, that means having a Spanish website.
Let’s look at the numbers:
As of 2015, the United States has 41 million native Spanish speakers, and 11.6 million bilingual Spanish speakers, for a grand total of 52.6 million Spanish speakers in the US. That means the US has more Spanish-speaking residents than Spain (46 million). The only country with more? Mexico, with 121 million.
The percent of the US population that speaks Spanish is only expected to grow. Between 2000–2014, Latinos accounted for 54% of the US’s population growth. Given the current trends, the US Census Office estimates that by 2050, there will be 138 million Spanish speakers in the US.
What’s interesting is that despite Spanish being the third most-used language on the internet, only 5.1% of internet content is written in Spanish.
In other words: despite the growing prevalence of Spanish speakers in the US, there are disproportionately few websites written in Spanish.
Having SeaLevelRise.org (and Flood iQ!) available in Spanish helps fill the gap of sea level rise educational tools available to Spanish-speakers.
This is especially important given the prevalence of Spanish-speaking households in areas at high risk of flooding from sea level rise.
For example, Miami-Dade is one of the counties in Florida most affected by sea level rise, and about 64% of Miami-Dade speaks Spanish at home (~1.53M) — with nearly half claiming they don’t speak English ‘very well.’
With the release of SeaLevelRise.org/es, impacted and high-risk communities like these now have greater access to clear, fact-based information on sea level rise, including its causes, forecast, and available solutions.
