Last summer, a story went through the world press: «Klimawandel: Bewohner verlassen Insel in Panama», was the headline on ARD and «Gardi Sugdub: The Americas’ disappearing island» was the headline on the BBC. A sinking island is forcing its inhabitants to look for a new home on land. The island is called Gardi Sugdub and is located in San Blas, the autonomous territory of the Gunas, in Panama. An island paradise of more than 350 islands. Is Gardi Sugdub, the crab island, now deserted? Perhaps it has already sunk, we ask ourselves and set course for the island.
The passage under engine from Turtle Cay Marina, where we pick up a few packages, to San Blas is rough. We have the little wind on our nose, cross seas shake the boat and us, we are both a bit seasick. After six hours, we reach the small island of Porvenir with its tiny airport. The next morning, we sail five nautical miles towards land and anchor right next to Gardi Sugdub. What we notice immediately is that the supposedly sinking island is by no means deserted. There is a lot of boat traffic between the island and the mainland.
Only a few minutes pass before someone knocks on our boat: “Hola, señor, hola!” Alex sticks his head out of the companionway. Ernesto, an indigenous Guna man, holds up a mola, a typical embroidery. “How about this?” Ernesto lives on Gardi Sugdub and we promise to drop by soon. A little later, we drive the dinghy through the murky water, in which all kinds of garbage and plastic floats, and moor up at the wobbly wooden jetty in front of Ernesto’s hut. It has been built right over the edge of the island, on stilts where necessary. There is no longer a coastline or a beach. Children play in the dirt, a cat wanders past plastic waste and a gutted generator. “Ernesto, we thought the inhabitants of the island had moved because of climate change. Isn’t that true?” “Mentira! Lie!” says Ernesto and leads us through the narrow alleyways. There is garbage everywhere, empty plastic bottles, cans, rusty motors.
We had actually expected the island to be empty, because climate change is a reality in San Blas. Last year, the sea was warmer than ever before, which led to coral bleaching. If the corals die, they become brittle. This can have catastrophic consequences for the island kingdom. The corals are not only the nurseries of the fish, but also the natural protective walls of the islands. There are islands that can still be seen in photographs in Eric Bauhaus Cruising Guide, the best about the San Blas archipelago, but of which only a small pile of sand now remains.
Gardi Sugdub, once the most populous island, still rises out of the water, piled up with dead coral and garbage, one meter high at its highest point. However, if the forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are to be believed, Gardi Sugdub will no longer exist by the turn of the century at the latest. By then, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the oceans will rise by up to one meter as the earth heats up faster and more strongly than previously assumed. All of the approximately 30,000 indigenous people living in the archipelago will have to move ashore in the coming decades, as none of their islands rise more than one meter above sea level. The first scientific studies that spoke of the San Blas archipelago being endangered by climate change were carried out twenty years ago. Talk of resettlement began. The Gunas of Gardi Sugdub also wanted to leave their island, but we soon realize that the story they are telling is a completely different one.
Gardi Sugdub resembles a labyrinth. The houses stand wall to wall, some made of concrete, others of wood or bamboo. Children run through the dirt, dogs and cats roam around. There is a school, but the chairs have been knocked over, leaves lie on the floor, a lamp has been torn from the ceiling and hangs almost to the floor. It looks as if a hurricane has destroyed the school, but it’s probably just carelessness. “The children now go to school on the mainland in the new settlement,” says Fausto, an islander. “But why are you still here? Climate change, flooding, rising sea levels – isn’t the island going under?” I ask and Fausto laughs. “That’s a lie. Nobody left the island because of climate change. People wanted to leave because there’s no more room for everyone here.”
The sinking island is not deserted at all. Small boats with powerful engines are constantly mooring and unmooring. Women sell bananas and plastic toys in a store and the health center in the center of the island has a well-equipped pharmacy. Dr. John is one of the two doctors at the center. He and his colleague treat the islanders from the entire region, including those who have now been resettled on land. Skin diseases, illnesses caused by a lack of hygiene and western civilization diseases, which never existed here before, are the ones they have to treat the most. Diabetes, high blood pressure, all new. With the advent of convenience food and sugar products, these diseases of civilization have also found their way into the island world. Here, where people used to live from fishing, manioc and coconuts. Now they buy canned fish and have replaced the fruit with packaged sugar products.
On a jetty, men sit on the wooden planks and drink beer. In a small wooden shed, one of them listens to Ramstein and sells us a Coke in a small plastic bottle. A plastic pipe runs from a river on land through the sea to the island and supplies the inhabitants with fresh water. Garbage is piled up everywhere and electrical appliances, motors and generators are rusting away. Even the wind turbine, which was supposed to generate electricity for the sinking island, is standing still. It’s broken and nobody has mended it. Electricity is available from 6 p.m. thanks to a generator.
While other islands in San Blas have already sunk or are in the process of being flooded, this island will probably survive for many years to come. It is too well protected and it is too normal for the islanders to be flooded every few months when another storm or high tide sweeps over the island. “People have moved because it got too crowded here. Heavy rain, the sea lapping over the island so that we’re ankle-deep in water, it’s all been here for as long as I can remember,” says Ernesto. In a hut, we meet an old woman embroidering a mola. Yes, it has become hotter, but floods are nothing new, she says. Although 84-year-old José Davis, her father and Saila, the village elder and spiritual leader of the community, has left the sinking island, she has stayed. “I like the sea breeze, the sea. I’m not going anywhere,” she says.
The next day, we take our dinghy one nautical mile to the port of Cartí. Gas bottles, oil barrels, liters of beer and cola, sacks of potatoes, onions, cabbage, bananas and tomatoes are piled up here on the jetty, waiting to be loaded onto boats. Those visiting the San Blas Islands from Panama City drive three hours through the jungle in a 4×4 to the port of Cartí. From here, people and goods are loaded onto boats and taken to their islands or ships, all the way to Colombia. It takes us 15 minutes in our dinghy from Mabul to Cartí, where we moor at one of the many piers. On the large forecourt are 4x4s, many new, expensive cars in which tourists as well as gunas in colorful embroidered mola dresses take a seat. We walk past a run-down basketball court, along a large, empty road, up the hill, jungle to the left and right.
On the way, a car stops to take us the four kilometers to the new settlement of La Barriada. The settlement was built by the government on around 22 acres on a plateau. The jungle had to make way for it. You can’t see the sea from here. The settlement roads are straight, as if drawn with a ruler, and each road is lined up with 300 identical, small houses, gray plastic cladding and red corrugated metal roofs, cheaply made, so that we wonder what these houses will look like in a year’s time.
There are no parks or green areas here. But almost every house has a garden. Some residents have erected pipes like tent poles and lashed a carpet of beer cans and plastic bottles around them, so that the tent now resembles a beer can and plastic bottle Christmas tree.
On the day of our visit, the army has set up a bouncy castle in the village center and the children line up nicely until it’s their turn to bounce. Where the congress normally meets, in the only traditional building with a palm leaf roof, an oversized army mannequin, similar to a Michelin man, moves with the children to the rhythm of Christmas music. A resident of the settlement has dressed up as Santa Claus.
We ask if we can visit the settlement and interview a few residents and are immediately led to the other side of the street, where a group of old men are watching the goings-on from their plastic chairs. “If you want to conduct interviews here and visit the settlement, you have to pay 200 US dollars. These are the rules we have set as Sailas,” says one of the old men. We start to negotiate. The cost per interview is 20 US dollars, and the translation costs extra. The day before on the island, everything had its price tag, a photo was one dollar. We agree on 30 US dollars for an interview with Saila José Davis, including translation.
Only later do we realize that José speaks perfect Spanish and that we could have actually had the conversation with him directly. For the interview, we accompany the old man who, supported by another old man, is now walking to his house on the other side of the street. Have the islanders moved here because of climate change, rising sea levels or not? José laughs and his old friend and the translator laugh too. “No! We’ve wanted to move for a long time,” he says, ”but not because of the climate. The climate hasn’t changed in all the decades I’ve lived on the island. We wanted to move because it was getting far too cramped on the island. We simply don’t all have room there anymore!” They had been trying to get off the island since 2010. At that time, they already owned the land in the jungle, but they had no money to build a new settlement. For years, they lobbied the government for support, but the government showed no interest in helping the indigenous people. So they came up with an idea, says the old man: “Everyone is talking about climate change, so we thought that if we said our sinking island was sinking because of climate change, then maybe they would help us. And that’s exactly what happened! All of a sudden, many foreign delegations and NGOs came and at some point the government was also willing to help us. Thanks to climate change, we now have houses and live right next to our fields!”
In 2017, the Panamanian government promised the residents of Gardi Sugdub that it would build a new settlement on land, as well as a school and a hospital. Years of delays, corruption, a construction company that suddenly disappeared and lost construction plans followed. In the end, La Barriada cost around 14 million US dollars. Although many things went wrong, the project is now cited worldwide as one of the first climate resettlement projects. For the Panamanian government, this international recognition and possible support funds for future climate projects were probably reason enough to build the settlement, says an NGO employee who has accompanied the islanders since the beginning of the planning and with whom I speak later, but who does not wish to be quoted. But why do the islanders reject any reference to the climate? “Because they are proud and fed up with the fact that the whole world wants to portray them as climate victims,” believes the NGO worker.
José and his colleague are full of praise for life in the new settlement: 24-hour electricity, plenty of space for the children to play, a school so big that even children from other islands now want to come here and they are now close to their fields and don’t have to drive over from the island all the time. In addition, the harbor and therefore possible work at the harbor or with tourists is also within walking distance.
We stroll through the estate. Behind every house is a plot of land where the residents grow their vegetables. But most of the land is clayey and washed out by the rain. We find Don Leo and his wife Rosa in one of the back rows of houses. They were born on the island, but had worked in the city for years. Their children went to school and studied in the city and they only came back to San Blas after they retired. When I ask them if I can do an interview with them, they look down at the ground in silence at first. “The Sailas have decided that every interview costs, everything costs, but we’re not like that,” says Leo.
He is concerned about the cultural change. However, this did not just begin with the move, but fifteen years ago, when the first tourists discovered this island paradise. “We used to live from bartering: a fish for manioc. One time my neighbor brings me a gift, the next time I bring him a gift. Now that no longer works, now everyone wants money.” Many of the wooden canoes now have outboard motors and they have to be repaired, which requires money. Leo and his wife regret the fact that nowadays everything is only worth money. It seems that with the opening up of this area, which was closed off for so long, the negative aspects of our civilization – greed, money, unhealthy food – have prevailed. I wonder if this has something to do with the pace. Everything has changed here in just a few years, but it is still the old government structures, the old men who control the community. Were they prepared enough to understand what was overtaking them and how they could balance the new with the old? The government has now built them the settlement, but at what cost?
Back on Mabul, I research the story and come across a report by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch. ““The Sea is Eating the Land Below Our Homes” Indigenous Community Facing Lack of Space and Rising Seas Plans Relocation” is the title of the 2023 report. Erica Bowen is the author and I interview her on the phone a few days later. When an island population has to relocate, there is never just one reason, says Bowen and criticizes: “If you only tell the climate story, then there is a danger that only this aspect will be taken into account when planning the new settlement. But the story is more complicated than that. Cultural aspects, water and medical care or waste disposal are all part of such a complex relocation. If you don’t pay attention to them, they won’t be addressed.”
Like in La Barriada. The water supply is inadequate and the planned hospital was already in ruins before it was even finished. Anyone who is ill still has to go back to Crab Island, where there is an infirmary. And as there is no waste disposal system, many residents take their garbage back to the sinking island or throw it into the sea. La Barriada is not the showcase project it is made out to be, but an example of how not to do it, says Bowen: “More than 400 communities around the world have already moved or will have to move in the coming years due to natural disasters and climate change. They could all learn from the islanders of Gardi Sugdub.” Not just them, I think. Also politicians, journalists and NGOs, all of us who would like to have complex problems explained and solved simply.
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