Caribbean & Central America - July 2024

At the end of May, Panama’s President Laurentino Cortizo handed the keys to 300 new homes to over 1,300 indigenous Guna people who are being resettled from Gardí Sugdub, an island in the San Blas Archipelago off the country’s northern coast, to the newly built settlement of Nuevo Cartí in the Guna Yala comarca (indigenous administrative region), on the mainland. The families, who have been resettled due to rising sea levels, are considered Panama’s first group of climate change migrants.

At an event on 29 May, President Cortizo said that the new homes, which had been built on 14 hectares of land with an investment of US$12.2m, would accommodate 1,351 people from the island which has been home to Guna indigenous people for over 100 years. He said that the project had been tendered in 2018 but was abandoned under the previous government led by former president Juan Carlos Varela (2014-2019), before being reprised in September 2020 under his government, and finalised this year.

The move comes almost a year after concern was raised by indigenous leaders and human rights groups over the Panamanian government’s ability to protect the island community from climate change. In July 2023, the US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report identifying “ongoing government delays” as posing a serious threat to the rights of Panama’s Guna people and urged the government to provide immediate support to the residents of Gardí Sugdub to aid them in their relocation to the mainland.

The HRW report cites a January 2023 environment ministry (Miambiente) report which states that the sea level of Panama’s Caribbean coast is predicted to rise by 0.27m by 2050, even under an optimistic emissions scenario of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s latest Assessment Report. HRW adds that islands in Panama’s Guna Yala archipelago “are among the areas where the report projects the most severe impacts”.

Approximately 300 metres long and 125 metres wide, the island of Gardí Sugdub has been particularly vulnerable to the effects of rising sea levels as its highest point stands at only one metre above sea level. HRW notes that the idea of relocating residents of Gardí Sugdub date back to the 1990s, when community leaders first saw reports of a projected sea level rise. It adds that in 2010, the island community came to a “reluctant acceptance” of the need to relocate to a safer site on Panama’s mainland as a last resort while seven years later, Panama’s housing ministry agreed to construct 300 new homes on a plot of land already owned by the Guna people, with technical support from the Inter-American Development Bank.

A global issue

A 29 May update by NGO Human Rights Watch notes that around the world, an estimated 400 communities have already completed or are undertaking planned relocation due to natural hazards, many of which are intensified by climate change.

Other communities to follow

Gardí Sugdub is not the only community requiring relocation due to the adverse effects of climate change. Estimates cited by HRW suggest that at least 38 other islands in Guna Yala will require relocation to the mainland in upcoming decades due to rising sea levels and extreme weather events.

A 26 June report by the Associated Press (AP) cites Steven Paton, a researcher for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, as saying that with the rise in sea levels “sooner or later the Gunas are going to have to abandon all of the islands, almost surely by the end of the century or earlier”.

AP referenced a recent study by Miambiente’s climate change directorate which estimates that by 2050, Panama will lose about 2.01% of its coastal territory to rising sea levels. It cited Ligia Castro, Miambiente’s climate change director, as estimating that it will cost about US$1.2bn to “relocate the 38,000 or so inhabitants who will face rising sea levels in the short- and medium-term”.