By: Staff Writer
March 22, 2024
During Panama’s worse drought on record, the renown Panama Canal is affected not only by weather challenges in this prolonged dry season, but the Gatun lake that supplies the canal with its water is also needed by nearly 2 million Panamanians for drinking water.
Hotter-than-average temperatures – 2023 was the hottest year on record – worsened by the El Nino weather phenomenon that sees warmer ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific have also increased evaporation from the lake.
“We depend on rainwater,” said Ilya Espino de Marotta, the canal’s first chief sustainability officer.
“You used to see a dry year every 15 to 20 years. Now we saw a dry year in 2016, one in 2019, one in 2023 so obviously there’s a climate issue we need to address,” she said.
The resulting water scarcity is a major problem as each vessel passing through the 50-mile (80-km) trans-oceanic waterway uses some 51 million gallons (193 million liters) of water from Gatun Lake.
The lake also provides drinking water to about half of Panama’s 4.5 million people and balancing these key but competing demands on a finite resource will be a critical issue for whoever comes to power after a presidential election in May.
Espino de Marotta says drinking water is prioritized but given the canal’s economic importance, water supply for both shipping and people must remain viable.
Last year, for the first time in its more than 100-year history, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) was forced to restrict ship transits due to low water levels in Gatun Lake. Queues of ships built up, and shipping rates increased because of the bottlenecks.
The waterway has operated entirely from water collected through rainfall, and has been hard hit by the combination of climate change and the El Nino weather phenomenon.
“We hope that before February 2025, the situation will normalize,” administrator Ricaurte Vasquez, the Panama Canal Authority administrator, told reporters on Wednesday.
He said the La Nina weather pattern, which is characterized in Central America by an increase in rainfall, should soon replace El Nino conditions, which produce the opposite effect.
“The indications point to a moderate La Nina” that could begin around April, and “a greater likelihood of intensity increasing in July and August,” Vasquez said.
The extra rainfall will not produce immediate changes to the volume of traffic however, as the shipping industry cannot adapt that quickly, he said.