Climate change drives Maldives to buy land

Financial Times: The Indian Ocean state of the Maldives will start to divert cash from its largest industry, tourism, to buy land in case rising sea levels submerge the country’s low-lying coral islands, spokespeople for the president-elect, Mohamed Nasheed, said on Monday. Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik, the vice-president-elect, said the “worst-case scenario due to sea level rise would be that some or even all of our islands would become uninhabitable and we would have to look for alternative places for Maldivians to live.”

A new sovereign wealth fund, modelled on those in oil-rich Middle Eastern states, is “part of our longer-term perspective,” Mr Waheed said, and will be preceded by an overhaul of state finances in the tourism-dependent country. Eighty per cent of the country’s 1,200 islands – of which 200 are inhabited – are less than one metre above sea level, and studies have said it could be submerged within 100 years.

Mr Nasheed’s government will be sworn in on Tuesday after the country’s first democratic election, ending 30 years of authoritarian rule by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Mr Gayoom, who has been accused of human rights abuses and criticised for his tight control over the nation’s 380,000 residents, has raised the link internationally between climate change and the human rights of potentially displaced citizens.

But Scott Leckie, director of Displacement Solutions, a Swiss-based refugee consultancy, warned, “We don’t know where they plan to buy this land or whether they have thought it through... Are they actually asking to re-establish the Maldives elsewhere?” Other low-lying states such as Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea have already started to feel the effects of rising sea levels, Mr Leckie said….

This photo from the Maldives by Nevit Dilmen, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2