Overcrowding, Not Rising Seas, Drives Relocation – Watts Up With That?

From ClimateRealism

By H. Sterling Burnett

Yahoo News recently posted an article from the environmental website The Cool Down claiming that the native residents of the very small Panamanian island, Gardí Sugdub (also known as Cartí Sugdupu), are being forced to flee due to fast rising sea levels swamping the land as a result of climate change. This is false. Sea levels at Gardi Sugdub aren’t rising unusually fast, and the best evidence is that most of the island’s residents are voluntarily abandoning it with government help due to overcrowding and insufficient services and infrastructure on the small island.

Grace Howarth, the author of the article, “Residents forced to flee from ‘disappearing island’ due to heartbreaking crisis: ‘There were no more friends, no more kids playing,’” writes describing the situation there:

Rising sea levels are splitting communities apart in Gardí Sugdub and leaving people behind, possibly in danger.

. . .

One year ago, around 1,200 Indigenous Guna people were transported to the mainland by the Panama government for their safety as ocean waters encroached upon their community.

Climate Realism debunked an earlier article from the BBC making the same claims in February of this year; nothing has changed in the four months since then.

Concerning the claim that rising seas are causing the residents of Gardi Sugdub to flee the island, the facts are these, the sea level around Panama has been rising at an average of about 1 to 3 mm per year, a rate consistent with natural post-Little Ice Age trends, a rate that has not increased during the recent period of climate change. As such, there is no indication of an impending climate catastrophe as described in Climate at a Glance. At this pace, it would take centuries before Gardi Sugdub would face submersion.

Indeed, nearby islands in Panama’s San Blas Island chain, of which Gardi Sugdub is one, have increased in size in recent years, as described in the article, titled “San Blas Reborn: New Islands Emerge Amidst Climate Change Hysteria.” The author of that article notes, “[o]ff the coast of Maoqui in the Dutch Cays, a new island is gradually taking shape. What started as a mere speck of land, approximately 5 meters by 8 meters, has grown over the past decade to a remarkable 40 meters by 80 meters.” What’s happening in and around the San Blas islands, island expansion and growth, is also happening to island chains and nations across the globe, as discussed in several Climate Realism posts, here and here, for example.

If not rising seas, what has finally encouraged the vast majority of Gardi Sugdub’s residents to accept Panama’s offer to relocate. The truth is less glamorous or attention grabbing than the climate crisis narrative, but its it the truth none the less. Gardi Sugdub is severely overcrowded, with more than 1,000 people packed into a tiny space of just 0.028 square miles. That’s a population density higher than New York City! As my colleague Anthony Watts detailed in his February post on the Gardi Sugdub’s abandonment in response to a false BBC article on the topic, the real reason for the relocation of Gardi Sugdub’s residents has nothing to do with climate change. Instead, it comes down to basic infrastructure challenges:

• Overpopulation– As seen in the head photograph, the island is overcrowded, with nowhere to expand. Unlike coral atolls that naturally grow, Cartí Sugdupu is an isolated, heavily inhabited island with no room for additional housing or development.
• Lack of Freshwater and Sanitation– Many small islands struggle with freshwater availability. The BBC ignores this and instead attributes all hardships to climate change.
• Economic and Government Decisions– Panama’s government is relocating the residents as part of a planned move, not an emergency evacuation due to rising waters.

With their story on the “plight” of the residents of Gardi Sugdub, The Cool Down, and Yahoo News by extension, the media outlets are just rehashing old debunked claims, in an effort to once again promote the false and flagging narrative that climate change causes everything bad. If most of the driftwood and tin shanty houses and shacks that currently cover Gardi Sugdub from shore to shore are cleared, perhaps the small island’s remaining residents can live out their lives in a modicum of comfort. The evidence suggests that at present rates of sea level rise, if nothing changes, Gardi Sugdub, as low lying as it is, won’t sink beneath the waves for a century or more. Whether that happens or not will have more to do with whether Panama wants to build infrastructure, including sea walls or better water treatment and delivery system, than any changes in climate.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.

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