Muizzu seeks easier funding to battle rising sea levels in low-lying Maldives
The summit wrapped up a day after the U.S. announced a new $275-million package of aid for Kyiv, part of a $61-billion military aid deal passed by Congress last month after months of delays.
Kicking o¤ the summit, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had urged her counterparts to embrace “ambitious options” in considering how to use the frozen Russian assets.
A debated U.S. proposal would tap the interest generated by the €300 billion of Russian central bank assets frozen by the G-7 and EU, creating a $50-billion loan facility backed by future interest on the assets.
Mr. Giorgetti — whose country Italy holds this year’s G-7 presidency — called the U.S. proposal a “¦exible and pragmatic” plan that answered the legal and regulatory concerns shared within the EU.
The Maldives on Saturday demanded international funding to battle rising sea levels, saying the low-lying Indian Ocean archipelago was being unfairly excluded from the most generous support measures.
“The Maldives is liable for just 0.003% of global emissions, but is one of the
rst countries to endure the existential consequences of the climate crisis,” President Mohamed Muizzu wrote in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
“Wealthier nations have a moral responsibility communities like ours.”
SIDS conference
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His comments came ahead of a once-a-decade conference of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) he will co-chair in Antigua and Barbuda, which opens on Monday.
SIDS receive “only about 14% of the nance that the least developed countries receive”, he said.
Maldives’ dichotomy
According to the IMF, the Maldives has a higher GDP per capita than Chile, Mexico, Malaysia or China, but Mr. Muizzu called gross domestic product a “legacy metric”.
“Thanks to the Maldives’ healthy tourism industry, we are ranked as an emerging economy and therefore shut out from the cheaper nancing set aside for the lowest income countries,” Mr. Muizzu added.
Mr. Muizzu has said that his country needs about $500 million to mitigate the e¤ects of climate change and the tourismdependent economy was unable to raise the money on its own.
The rst SIDS meeting was in 1994, ve years after Maldives’ then-President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom warned that his atoll nation of 1,192 tiny coral islets faced extinction if sea levels rose by a metre (3.3 feet).