Climate change and droughts hit Panama Canal
President Trump wants to reclaim the Panama Canal, but the waterway is facing a long-running water crisis.
The canal spans about 80km, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and allowing up to 14,000 ships to cross each year, saving them a 13,000km journey around the tip of South America.
The canal is an engineering marvel but depends entirely on heavy rainfall. Each ship is raised up the hills of Panama using a series of locks and then lowered by locks on the other side. But each crossing causes about 50 million gallons of freshwater to be lost, which is replenished from Lake Gatun, the world’s largest artificial freshwater lake at the time it was built. The lake can only be refilled by rainfall, which is not usually a problem because Panama is the fifth-wettest country in the world, experiencing nearly 3,000mm of rainfall each year, most of it falling in the wet season from May to December.
But Panama is especially vulnerable to droughts in El Niño years when rainfall is reduced. In any case, rainfall patterns are changing and temperatures are rising. Significant droughts that used to strike the country roughly every 20 years are becoming more frequent and have greater intensity. Without enough freshwater flowing in, the canal’s locks cannot raise and lower ships. So drought means fewer ships crossing each day, which can rapidly hit Panama’s finances and economies around the world.
The climate of Panama is also changing. Three droughts struck in less than three decades and in 2023-24 an El Niño drought reduced Lake Gatun’s water levels so much that the number of ships passing through the canal had to be cut by a third, severely delaying ships’ journeys.
Even the waterway’s two newest locks, built in 2016, reuse only about 60 per cent of water on each ship crossing; 40 per cent is flushed away. To bolster water supplies in future droughts, the canal authority is planning to create a new freshwater reservoir by damming the Rio Indio, a $1.6 billion project estimated to take six years to complete that will involve relocating about 2,300 people as communities will have to be flooded.