The Gardi islands are doomed to disappear underwater. The rise in sea level caused by climate change will devour these 5 small islands in the Panamanian Caribbean in a few years. Over a thousand inhabitants of one of these islands, Gardi Sugdub, indigenous people of the Kuna ethnicity, are awaiting relocation to a new settlement on the mainland. The Panamanian government has built a neighborhood with 300 houses and a school to which they should start moving in early 2024. On the day this happens, the Kuna of Gardi Sugdub will definitively become climate refugees.
They are the first in this part of the world, but the entire Kuna Yala archipelago, with more than 70 inhabited islands, faces the same fate. The Kuna arrived in this place 300 years ago, escaping the violence and diseases brought by Spanish conquerors. Today, the entire Kuna community is threatened by the same sea that has often served as their refuge.
Edu Ponces studied at Institut d'Estudis Fotogràfics de Catalunya (IEFC) and is one of the founding members of RUIDO Photo. He was photo editor at ElFaro.net from El Salvador and published in media such The Guardian, El País, La Vanguardia, CNN, among others. He received several international awards such as Premio Ortega y Gasset 2019 (granted by the world's biggest newspaper in Spanish, El Pais), Picture of the Year Latin America 2017 and 2023 (POYLatam), World Understanding Award 2014 for Picture of the Year International (POYi), Best Picture Book 2010 for POYLatam, and the National Award of Journalism and Human Rights of El Salvador. In 2019 he received the Documenting Human Migration Grant from National Geographic Society.