‘We can’t wait’
Maldives desperate for funds as islands risk going underwater due to impact of climate change
The tropical Maldives may lose entire islands unless it can quickly access cheap financing to fight the impact of climate change, its foreign minister said.
The archipelago’s former president Mohamed Nasheed famously held a cabinet meeting underwater to draw attention to submerging land and global warming a decade ago.
Yet the Maldives, best known for its white sands and palm-fringed atolls that draw luxury holiday-makers, has struggled to find money to build critical infrastructure like sea-walls.
“For small states, it is not easy,” Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid told Reuters in New Delhi. “By the time the financing is obtained, we may be underwater.”
At the UN climate talks in Madrid in December, the Maldives and other vulnerable countries pushed for concrete progress on fresh funding to help them deal with disasters and longer-term damage linked to climate change - but failed.
Shahid was hopeful the next round of talks, slated to take place in Glasgow in November, would yield better results.
One of the world’s lowest-lying countries, more than 80% of the Maldives’ land is less than one meter above mean sea levels. In 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami ravaged the Muslim-majority state, causing financial losses of around $470 million and hitting infrastructure.
In 2014, more than 100 of the archipelago’s inhabited islands were already reporting erosion, and around 30 islands are identified as severely eroded. “In order to protect the islands, we need to start building sea walls,” Shahid said. “It’s expensive, but we need it. We can’t wait until all of them are being taken away.”