Island nation needs $8.8bn for sea battle
NEW DELHI: The tropical Maldives may lose entire islands unless it can quickly access cheap financing — $8.8 billion (267 billion baht) in total — 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 holidaymakers, is struggling 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 under water.”
At December’s UN climate talks in Madrid, 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.
One of the world’s lowest-lying countries, more than 80% of the Maldives is less than one metre above sea level, making its population of around 530,000 people extremely vulnerable to storm surges, sea swells and severe weather.
In 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami ravaged the country, causing financial losses of around $470 million — 62% of GDP — and hitting infrastructure, including its only international airport that was shut for several days.
Two of the country’s main industries — tourism and fishing — are heavily dependent on coastal resources, and most settlements and critical infrastructure is concentrated along the coast.
In 2014, more than 100 of the archipelago’s inhabited islands were already reporting erosion, and around 30 islands are identified as severely eroded.
The Maldives will need up to $8.8 billion in total to to shield all of its inhabited islands, said Mr Shahid. “In order to protect the islands, we need to start building sea walls,” Mr Shahid said. “It’s expensive, but we need it. We can’t wait until all of them are being taken away.”
Environment Minister Hussain Rasheed Hassan said his country would have to turn to banks given inadequate funding elsewhere despite the fact small nations like his were paying the price for the developed world’s pollution.
“We have to beg some of these [big] emitters to provide money for us. Is that fair?” he said.