Panama Canal Watershed

The Panama Canal is the most important commercial waterway in the world. Each year 13,000 ships carrying more than 275 million tonnes of cargo use this man-made short cut, saving on fuel and reducing carbon emissions, to avoid the long and dangerous trip around South America, in order to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Panama Canal operations depend on water – each ship passing through the Canal locks requires 50 million gallons (190,000 cubic metres) of fresh water, an annual total of 650 billion gallons (2.5 billion cubic metres) of water.

The water flowing through the Canal originates far upstream in the forested hills of the Panama Canal Watershed. Water flowing through the watershed's ecosystem gives life to its lush and exceptionally diverse forests, which are home to unique collections of wildlife.

Water from the Panama Canal Watershed provides two additional and extremely important services:

• Power for the turbines that generate clean energy;
• Clean drinking water for Panama’s two largest cities, Panama and Colon.

The Panama Canal Watershed project will utilise the Canal's central role in world commerce to focus global attention on the ecosystem services provided by tropical forests. It will:

• Be the largest field experiment of its kind in the tropics, aimed at quantifying the environmental services (water, carbon and biodiversity) provided by tropical forests;
• Permit complete water and carbon inventories for different landscape uses, and through experiments at the scale of entire stream-catchments, address the following questions:
  • How do landscape treatments and management approaches affect ecosystem services such as carbon storage, water quality and quantity, and biodiversity?
  • Can management techniques be designed to optimise forest production along with ecosystem services during reforestation?
  • Do different tree planting treatments and landscape management approaches influence groundwater storage, which is thought to be critical to recharging the reservoir of the Panama Canal, thus ensuring the full operation of the Canal during periods of reduced rainfall and severe climatic events such El Niño?