Rising seas force Panama Indigenous families to leave island homes
PANAMA CITY (Reuters) - Rising sea levels due to climate change have forced an Indigenous Guna community to leave their homes on an island off Panama's coast that is fast disappearing.
Some 300 families - 1,351 people - based in Gardi Subdug, a small Caribbean island a couple of kilometers off the Central American coastline, received keys on Wednesday to their new houses in a small woodland settlement on the mainland.
"I'm very happy, it feels like a dream," villager Victoria Navarro told an inauguration ceremony in her Guna dialect, translated by a Spanish interpreter. "We have been fighting for 14 years and it has finally come true."
A 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that on current trends, average global sea levels could rise by more than a meter by the end of the century.
Panama, which bridges Central and South America, counts 386,000 people - nearly one in 10 - who live less than 10 meters above sea level, according to a recent U.N. report. Over 4% live less than five meters above the waves.
