A lengthy drought that caused widespread disruption to commercial ships passing through the Panama Canal in 2023 would have been “unlikely” without the influence of El Niño, according to a rapid attribution study.
Last year was Panama’s third driest on record. The low rainfall caused water levels in Gatún Lake – a crucial part of the country’s internationally important canal and key fresh water supply for millions of people – to drop to record-low levels.
Authorities reduced shipping through the canal to conserve the lake’s fresh water, resulting in queues of ships waiting for weeks to cross the canal. As shipments of everything from fruit to gas were delayed and rerouted, knock-on effects rippled across the globe.
The new study, by the World Weather Attribution service, did not find a significant long-term drying trend in rainfall over Panama. However, it noted that since 1900, four of the five driest years in the region have occurred in El Niño years,
El Niño reduced last year’s rainfall by about 8%, the authors find.
With the canal’s water use expected to more than double by 2050, the study warns that authorities “may need to re-introduce shipping restrictions to safeguard drinking water supplies, particularly in El Niño years”.
Shipping backlog
Opened in 1914, the Panama Canal – an engineered waterway connecting the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans – is a cornerstone for global marine shipping. Around 14,000 ships pass through the canal every year, accounting for 5% of all global maritime trade.
Using the canal, rather than travelling around the southern tip of South America, ships can cut some 13,000km off their journey. Ships pay a toll for using the canal, which adds more than $2.5bn to Panama’s economy every year.
Gatún Lake is pivotal for the canal’s operation. This artificial, rain-fed lake sits near the centre of the canal, around 26 metres above sea level. Ships travelling into the canal pass through a series of locks, each of which fills with water to raise the ship up to the level of the lake. After travelling through the lake, another series of locks lower the ships back down to sea level.
For every ship that moves through the canal – a process which takes between eight and 10 hours – around 200m litres of fresh lake water is used, most of which is flushed out to sea.
Panama is the fifth wettest country in the world and sees most of its rainfall in its May-December rainy season.
However, total rainfall in 2023 was 30% lower than average. October was especially dry, recording 41% less rainfall than usual.
As a result, water levels in the rainfall-fed Gatún Lake reached a record low in the second half of 2023.
The map below shows water levels in Gatún Lake since 1965, where each line represents one year. The solid black line indicates 2023-24, while the dashed line shows projected lake water levels until mid-June 2024.
Under normal circumstances, the Panama Canal allows 36 “transits” every day. However, as lake levels dropped, the Panama Canal Authority (APC) began taking measures to conserve water. It reduced the number of daily crossings first to 32, then 31. And finally in November 2023 it announced that only 25 crossings would be allowed per day.
Ships began waiting in line for weeks to cross the canal, often paying millions of dollars to jump the queue if another ship with a booked reservation dropped out. By late August, around 135 ships were waiting to cross – 50% more than normal.
Around the world, shipments of everything from food to fuel were delayed.
Rainfall trends
The Panama Canal watershed is a series of natural and artificial rivers, sub-basins and lakes covering some 3,000 square kilometres on either side of Gatún Lake. According to the WWA study, all of the water used by the Panama Canal comes from this area.
The study authors say a network of around 65 weather stations operate in and around the watershed, providing some of the best rainfall records across the entirety of central America and the Caribbean.
To put Panama’s drought into its historical context and determine how unlikely it was, the authors analysed a timeseries of rainfall around the catchment of Gatún Lake in the 2023 rainy season, between May and December.
The map below shows the 2023 rainy season compared to the 1990-2020 average. Brown indicates that 2023 was drier than average and green that it was wetter. Gatún Lake is shaded grey and the study area is outlined in red.
Dr Clair Barnes – a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and author on the study – told a press briefing that there was some evidence of an overall drying trend in some of the stations, while others saw a wetting trend.
Overall, she said the study finds a slight drying trend, but notes the high uncertainty in this finding. She adds:
“We’re not sure exactly what is causing that drying trend or if it is an anomaly. Future trends in a warming climate are also uncertain.”
The authors investigated the impact of El Niño – a global weather phenomenon that originates in the Pacific Ocean – on rainfall in Panama.
During El Niño years, a weakening in the trade winds across the equatorial Pacific brings warm ocean temperatures to the eastern Pacific, off the coast of South America. In Panama, El Niño years are linked with below-average rainfall.
During La Niña years, the opposite effects are seen. Both phases together are known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
Steven Paton is the director of the physical monitoring programme at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and an author on the study.
He told a press briefing that 2023 was “the third driest year ever recorded [in Panama] in the 143 years that we have data”. He noted that all of the three driest years on record were recorded during an El Niño event.
The researchers find that in today’s climate, during an El Niño year, Panama has a 5% chance of seeing rainfall levels as low as those in 2023. Given the current frequency of El Niño events, this means that similar events would be expected to occur around once every 40 years in the present climate, they say.
The authors find that El Niño reduced the volume of rainfall that fell in 2023 by about 8%, compared to an ENSO-neutral year, adding that it “is unlikely that Panama could experience such a low rainy season without the influence of El Niño”.
The researchers also assess whether human-caused climate change played a role in Panama’s very low rainfall levels.
To conduct attribution studies, scientists use models to compare the world as it is today to a “counterfactual” world without climate change. This study aimed to identify any potential “signal” of climate change in Panama’s rainfall pattern.
However, only one of the climate models used in this study was able to capture rainfall patterns over the study region accurately, and the authors were unable to determine whether any trend in rainfall over the region was due to climate change.
(These findings are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. However, the methods used in the analysis have been published in previous attribution studies.)
Compounding impacts
The Panama drought shows how changes in weather conditions, such as rainfall patterns, can interact with other hazards.
Maja Vahlberg is a risk consultant at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and author on the study. She told the press briefing that disruptions to the Panama Canal interacted with those in the Suez Canal – caused by Yemen’s Houthi group attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea – to drive “compounding and cascading impacts” on global shipping patterns.
This also exacerbated the existing disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Covid pandemic.
As a backlog of ships in the Panama Canal grew, delays lengthened from days to weeks. Al Jazeera described the affected shipments:
“Bananas from Ecuador to Florida. Poultry from Chile to northern Europe. Liquid Natural Gas from the US to Asia. And virtually anything under the sun out of China.”
Around December, newspapers began to warn that shipments of Christmas goods may fail to reach retailers in time for the festive season.
Europe typically imports fresh produce from South and Central America during the winter months, with food and drink making up 77% of container shipments between the west coast of South America and Europe in 2022.
For example, Peru supplies the UK with £2bn worth of goods every year, including more than £350m of “fresh produce”. However, many ships carrying fruits, vegetables and meat from South America to Europe were stuck in the backlog, resulting in “excessive delays”.
The drought also impacted shipments of oil and gas. The US uses the canal as a major trade route for carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Gulf coast to Asia. However, average waiting times for tankers carrying LNG north through the canal rose from eight days in July to 18 days in August.
Meanwhile, Gatún Lake also supplies drinking water for more than half of Panama’s 4.3 million people. As a result, the government was required to balance the demands of international shipping with the water usage needs of the locals.
Vahlberg told the press briefing that “Indigenous, Afro-Panamanian and some rural communities have very water-dependent livelihoods”. She explained that these communities often have “higher rates of poverty and limited access to basic services”, meaning that “even small changes in precipitation can bring disproportionate impacts on their livelihoods”.
She added that urban expansion and population growth, combined with ageing infrastructure that loses water through leaks, are putting increasing pressure on the country’s water supplies.
The study notes that by 2050, the canal’s water use is expected to be more than double 2015 levels. It warns that, in future, authorities “may need to re-introduce shipping restrictions to safeguard drinking water supplies, particularly in El Niño years”.
The post Drought behind Panama Canal’s 2023 shipping disruption ‘unlikely’ without El Niño appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Drought behind Panama Canal’s 2023 shipping disruption ‘unlikely’ without El Niño
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products
We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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