Tuvalu isn’t the only small island on the verge of disappearing due to the climate change. The Maldives is a chain of 1,192 islets (small islands, of which 200 are inhabited) in the Indian Ocean south of India.
Like Tuvalu, the Maldives are in desperate need of a solution to the rising sea levels. The Maldives are the lowest country in the world, only 2.3 meters above sea level at its highest point. The average point is 1.5 meters. The sea level has risen 20 centimeters in the last hundred years. That doesn’t sound that bad – 20 centimeters in a century? But, when your land is only 4 feet 11 inches above sea level and the sea has risen 8 inches, it is cause for concern. It is estimated that by 2100, the sea level will have risen 23 inches.
Like the representatives of Tuvalu, the officials of the Maldives have been pleading for the rest of the world to cut greenhouse emissions. But, the country cannot wait on the rest of the world to decide to help. Taking matters into his own hands, Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed announced in late 2008 that he was trying to purchase land in India, Sri Lanka, and Australia for his people to relocate to before the islands are flooded with water. As Nasheed put it, “We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.” He was named one of TIME’s “Heroes of the Environment” in 2009.
To help themselves, the approximately 400,000 people who live on the islands plan to go carbon neutral by 2020. In doing so, they hope to save not only their land, but their two main industries – fishing and tourism.
Of course, climate change is not the only threat to islands such as the Maldives. A 2004 tsunami caused severe damage to both homes and the environment, so much so that cartographers had to redo maps of the islands.
(Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.)
