It was a bittersweet moment for Marielis Lopez, 26, when she was handed the keys to a free two-bedroom prefabricated house on the Panamanian mainland. “I am excited,” the mother-of -two, wearing the traditional dulemola embroidered blouse of the Guna community, said. “But I am missing my things.”
Her possessions should arrive soon but her life will never be quite the same again. Lopez was part of an advance party for the 1,351 people who are due to abandon a low-lying speck of land in the San Blas archipelago off Panama’s Caribbean coast this week, having made the momentous decision that rising seas and repeated flooding mean a future on their overcrowded island is neither safe nor sustainable.
It is the first case in Latin America of an organised relocation triggered in part by climate change, a process expected to accelerate across the world in the coming years.
The UN intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) estimates that, on current trends, average global sea levels could rise by more than a metre by the end of this century.
For the 300 Guna families setting off from their homes on Gardi Sugdub — or Crab Island — that means exchanging mostly reed and zinc-roofed huts, surrounded by crystalline waters, for social housing in a purpose-built suburban-style village, a 30-minute walk inland from the coast.
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“I am adapting to the new reality,” Eric Morales, another member of the advance party, said as he inspected his new house on Wednesday. “We will at least have more space,” he told Panamanian television.
The handover ceremony was hosted by Panama’s President Cortizo, who said: “This is a consequence of the climate crisis. The whole world has to confront this crisis.”
The relocation project was proposed by the Guna islanders in the 1990s, when their community leaders began to raise concerns with the government about population growth and rising sea levels around Gardi Sugdub, which is the size of about five football pitches.
Since then there have been repeated delays — most recently blamed on Covid complications and haggling over the $12.2 million (£9.5 million) government budget for the new settlement.
Meanwhile, Gardi Sugdub residents attempted to shore up their fragile coastline with rocks and coral until they accepted that it was a losing battle.
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Often, at high tide, the island’s dusty narrow streets would flood. Teachers and students could be seen wading in rubber boots to reach the main school on the edge of the island. There were few places to escape the waters and nowhere to build new homes.
The average annual rise in sea levels in the Panamanian Caribbean has accelerated from about 1mm in the 1960s to 3.5mm in recent years, according to tide and satellite data from the Panama Canal Authority and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Panama’s Ministry of Environment says the population should prepare for a sea level rise of 27cm between now and 2050.
That would mean Gardi Sugdub and the majority of the San Blas archipelago, which was settled in the mid-19th century by the Guna people escaping malaria and persecution on the mainland, will become uninhabitable. The highest point on most of the islands is one metre or less. Some smaller outcrops will entirely disappear beneath the sea.
Rising seas are a growing risk to millions of people across the world, with a World Bank report this year warning that atoll nations and coastal communities face “catastrophic threats” to their homes.
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In 2021, the bank estimated that climate change would push about 216 million people globally to be displaced within their own countries — many moving from low-lying to mountainous areas.
Island states particularly at risk include the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Fiji in the central and south Pacific and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.
But the issue is by no means restricted to warm weather nations. In 2019, the 300 or so residents of the Alaskan coastal village of Newtok began to relocate as the permafrost on which their village was built began to melt, while rising water levels in a nearby river eroded the shoreline. The move to a new village nine miles away is expected to be completed by the end of this year. More than 30 other Alaskan communities have been identified as facing imminent threats that would make their locations potentially uninhabitable in the near future.
In Panama, some have expressed concern that the move from an island to the mainland has not been properly planned, even though the government has made an effort to ensure that Guna traditions are respected. There is a thatched onmaket nega (congress house), where community decisions will be made and ancestral traditions shared through song.
Atencio López Martínez, a lawyer representing the Guna, said he was most worried about the fact that the their new home was relatively far from the sea. “Now we are going to depend a lot on canned food from supermarkets,” he told the environmental news website Mongabay.
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But Marielis Lopez said that, despite her nervousness, she was very happy to be in a home where there would be more space for her children. The first thing she planned to do, she said, was plant some flowers in the garden outside.
