Nearly 150 ships are waiting outside the Panama Canal as a rainfall crisis has led officials to ratchet down the number of vessels that can make it through the 100-year-old waterway.
But experts say the water shortage is consistent with the impacts of climate change, and Panamanian officials will need to make changes if they are to prevent this crisis from happening again.
The Green Seas podcast spoke to hydrologist Erick Cordoba, the head of the water department at the Panama Canal Authority, about the short-term and long-term solutions that the agency is pursuing to tackle the crisis.
We also interview Gabriel Aleman, head of the Panama Canal Pilots Association, about the insistence by unions that the authority should build projects connecting to the Indio River watershed, to prevent future rainfall shortages from crimping the canal.
Aleman and Cordoba agree on that long-term solution, but there is a barrier: the Indio River is outside the canal authority’s jurisdiction.
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