[imagesource:miami.edu/danielsuman]

The inhabitants of a tiny island off Panama’s Caribbean coast are preparing to leave the home they have known for generations as rising sea levels and climate change force them onto the mainland.

Generations of Gunas have grown up on Gardi Sugdub in a life dedicated to the sea and tourism, but they have now become the first of 63 communities along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts that government officials and scientists expect to be forced to relocate by rising sea levels in the coming decades.

Despite the ordeal of leaving your home, the inhabitants of this island are doing so voluntarily, although a few have decided to stay on for longer, or at least as long as they can.

Gardi Sugdub is one of about 50 populated islands in the archipelago of the Guna Yala territory. It is only about 366 metres long and 137 metres wide and is surrounded by dozens of short docks where residents tie up their boats. Every year, water fills the streets and gets inside homes, especially in November and December when the sea is driven up by high winds.

However, more recently climate change has been warming the waters in the region, intensifying storms and leading to flooding well beyond what the island can manage. Despite reinforcing the island’s perimeter with rocks, pilings and coral, seawater keeps coming.

“We’re a little sad, because we’re going to leave behind the homes we’ve known all our lives, the relationship with the sea, where we fish, where we bathe and where the tourists come, but the sea is sinking the island little by little, but lately, climate change has had a major impact,” says Nadin Morales, who is preparing to leave her home with her family.

“Now the tide comes to a level it didn’t before, and the heat is unbearable.”

The Guna’s autonomous government decided two decades ago that they needed to think about leaving the island, but at that time it was because the island was getting too crowded. The effects of climate change accelerated that thinking, said Evelio Lopez, a 61-year-old teacher on the island.

“Leaving the sea, the economic activities that we have there on the island, and now we’re going to be on solid ground, in the forest. We’re going to see what the result is in the long run.”

He plans to move with relatives to the new site on the mainland that the government developed at a cost of $12 million. The concrete houses sit on a grid of paved streets carved out of the lush tropical jungle just over 2 kilometres from the port, where an eight-minute boat ride carries them to Gardi Sugdub.

Steven Paton, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s physical monitoring program in Panama, said that the upcoming move “is a direct consequence of climate change through the increase in sea level.”

“The islands on average are only a half-meter above sea level, and as that level rises, 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,” he said.

“All of the world’s coasts are being affected by this at different speeds.”

A small Mexican beach community’s residents were forced to migrate north last year as storms kept on destroying their homes. From the coastal towns of New Zealand to the Italian lagoon city of Venice, governments are now being compelled to respond to the growing dangers of climate change.

A recent study by Panama’s Environmental Ministry’s Climate Change directorate found that Panama would lose about 2.01% of its coastal territory to increases in sea levels. Current estimates reckon it will cost about $1.2 billion (R22 billion) to relocate the 38,000 or so inhabitants who will face rising sea levels in the short- and medium-term.

The inhabitants of Gardi Sugdub have lived surrounded by the ocean for as long as they can remember, so there is no way of knowing how the move inland will affect the community or traditions.

[source:voanews]