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Thomson Reuters Foundation
MERCEDES, Texas
When it rains in South Texas, Norma Aldape worries that dirty water will overwhelm the shantytowns - known as colonias - where she lives tight against the US-Mexico border.
With the prospect of climate change bringing more powerful storms more often, flooding is the latest ordeal for 500,000 people in Texas living with little or no drainage in colonias that are largely unheard of further from the border.
Residents like Aldape already have had to fight for decades to get basic services such as sanitation and electricity, and tens of thousands still get by without clean water, street lights, paved roads or public transport.
But sitting on low-lying floodplains once fields and orchards along the meandering waterway of the Rio Grande, the colonias now face an even greater danger - climate disasters.
"Climate change has a huge affect on the poor, especially the poor that live in a place like the Rio Grande Valley,"said Nick Mitchell-Bennett, head of the Community Development Corporation of Brownsville (CDCB), working on housing issues.
