Sunday 16/11/2008 Page: 17
SO WHAT do you do if you are the newly elected president of a small, relatively impoverished country whose greatest claim to fame, besides arguably the finest beaches hi the world, is the fact that it is slowly sinking into the sea? You lose no time reminding the world of that fact. And to underline tine urgency of the problem, you reveal the startling news that you are seriously thinking about moving the whole nation elsewhere.That is what Mohamed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of the Maldives, did last week. He aims to start setting aside some of his country's sizeable tourist revenue to set up a land-purchase fund. "We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own so we have to buy land elsewhere," he said on the eve of his inauguration. "We do not want to leave the Maldives but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades."
It is an intriguing, if deeply depressing idea: the first nation on earth to be forced to abandon its homeland because of of global warming and rising sea levels. Mr Nasheed is talking about relocating the Maldives' 300,000-strong population to nearby India, or Sri Lanka or possibly Australia. But would it be feasible? The current consensus seems to be that it is not.
"It would be very difficult for a state, as such, to move," says Dr Graham Price, head of tine Asia program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. "There can be ad hoc migration, of course, even of quite large numbers. But there are big jurisdictional issues here, issues of sovereignty. That said, it is a real problem, and one we're going to have to get used to.
Nasheed is saying to the world, we really have to think about this. We want to stay together, we don't want to lose our culture, and this isn't our fault." No one doubts the Maldives' crisis is real. Made up of nearly 1200 islands and atolls -200 of them inhabited - in the Indian Ocean, it holds the record for the country with the lowest high point on earth: nowhere does the natural ground level exceed 2.3 metres.
Most of its land mass is a great deal lower than that, averaging around 1.5 metres. Climate change will affect the Maldives more than most places. Sea levels in the area have risen by about 20 centimetres in the past century and the UN estimates they will rise 58 centimetres more by 2100. The country and its capital, Male, were inundated by unusually high tides in 1987 that caused millions of dollars worth of damage. The Asian tsunami of December 26, 2004, was even more devastating. The wave that struck the Maldives was barely a metre high but it killed 82 people, displaced 12,000 and inflicted $US375 million of damage (including $100 million to the exclusive beachside resorts).
Tourists may be vital to the Maldives' economy but they are all but ignorant of its problems. The country is one of the world's most up market destinations, its luxurious beachside bungalows particularly popular with honeymooning couples. Nearly 90 otherwise uninhabited islands have been turned into resorts that pull in more than 600,000 mostly European visitors each year.
But while the average visitor apparently spends about $300 a day, they will rarely come into contact with local Maldivians, transported to their atoll by speedboat or small plane, and never stepping off it except for the odd day cruise. This industry, though, accounts for maybe one-third of the Maldives' GDP and at least 60% of its foreign exchange. Import duties and tourism-related taxes generate more than 90% of the government's income; there is little other economic activity on the islands except for fishing.
Few of those visitors are going to keep coming once their accommodation risks slipping beneath the waves at any moment. The Maldives has been working for some time on one possible solution: constricting a new island, Hulu Male, or New Male, to which it hopes to be able to transfer the populations of some of its lowest lying atolls and, eventually, the capital, one of the most densely populated towns in the world.
"They've. been dredging the waters around the existing island to raise it to above the 2.1-metre mark," says Saleemul Huq, head of the climate-change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development. Some of the smallest inhabited atolls, Mr Huq says, "are thinking in terms of relocation', but only, at this stage, within the archipelago.
Longer term, though, "if the measures we are taking to counter global warming do not prove sufficient, then it may well be that people will have to be moved further afield." Such eventualities are being discussed already, Mr Huq says, with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change providing an initial forum to talk through the "adaptation' of the most vulnerable countries. The island of Tuvalu, for example, is in talks with Australia about much the same kind of idea.
Cultural differences would be minimal if Maldivians moved to Sri Lanka or India (many already work there, and wealthy Maldivians have, been buying homes in Sri Lanka for years). Amid India's 1.13 billion people, 300,000 Maldivians is not be a lot. But apart from the human cost of uprooting them, the international legal system is not up to the job.
"There isn't really a big plot of land in either country which you could say is available," says Dr Price. "There's a possible parallel with the case of the Bhutanese refugees in Nepal - the US has volunteered to take 60,000 of them. But that is a group of people, not a nation.... If they have money I suppose somewhere in Africa might volunteer - maybe a place like the Zanzibar could work? A state cannot play host to another state. In Sri Lanka at least, the whole cause of its civil war is precisely this kind of federal issue."
The inventory of conflict and environment at the American University in Washington, DC, foresees potential for conflict beyond the Maldives as sea levels rise. "It is possible that the Maldives would seek to be compensated by polluting countries for the loss of their islands," it suggests in an advisory paper.
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