Pacific islands not sinking from global warming

Of all the apocalyptic imagery summoned by global warming's proponents, the most compelling has been the threat of coastal devastation from rising sea levels. In his best-selling work "Earth in the Balance," Al Gore argued that the selfishness of Western industrialization would obliterate small, impoverished countries.

"Although the sea level has risen and fallen through different geological periods, never has the change been anywhere near as rapid as that now expected as a consequence of global warming," he wrote. "... [I]sland nations like the Maldives and Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), will be devastated if the projections made by scientists turn out to be accurate." Mr. Gore solemnly predicted that millions of poor inhabitants would be forced to flee their homelands in a desperate bid for survival - unless we adopt his political agenda. It just isn't so.

In a forthcoming issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change, researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji documented changes in 27 vulnerable, low-lying reef islands in the Central Pacific. Using aerial photographs taken as early as 1944, the areas were carefully mapped and compared with modern satellite images.

It turns out that the islands did, in fact, change over time, but they are hardly sinking. Overall, 20 grew or remained stable. The island of Funamanu, for example, expanded from 7.4 acres to 9.5 acres in size - a 28 percent growth. Only seven islands shrunk, with the biggest percentage change occurring on Tengasu, which dropped from a tiny 1.7 acres to 1.5 acres - a diminishment of 9,670 square feet, the size of Mr. Gore's Tennessee mansion.

According to various studies, sea levels appear to have risen about 8 inches since the year 1860, but these Pacific islands continue to prosper nonetheless. This new study attributed size differences over time to the effect of ocean swells pounding and eroding windward shorelines. On leeward sides protected from the swells, coastlines grew. In other words, nature struck a near-perfect balance, wholly unaffected by the purported evils of America's internal-combustion engines.

This research was not conducted by scientists who disputed climate change, but even they noted the suspicious absence of verification for a key alarmist claim. "The lack of monitoring seems a gross oversight given the international concern over small island stability and pressing concerns of island communities to manage island landscapes," the report stated.

So the islands aren't sinking, the Hockey Stick has been thoroughly debunked, the Himalayas still have snow and the polar bears are alive and well. As just about every tenet in the Church of Global Warming has been debunked, it's time for the movement's high priest, Mr. Gore, to offer a refund to those from his flock who bought his work of fiction.

Source: washingtontimes.com

Can Mohamed Nasheed save the Maldives – and the rest of the world – from the rising seas?

The Maldives president roused the Tory faithful at Manchester last week. Next Saturday he will hold an underwater cabinet meeting to highlight the dangers of global warming



On a humid, airless night last March, Mohamed Nasheed – the 42-year-old president of the Maldives – opened up his palace in Male for an unusual public event. A projection screen was hung at the back of a ballroom and brightly coloured chairs were arranged in rows. Then the audience was shown in: lawyers, cabinet members, presidential advisers and journalists, along with a sizeable chunk of Maldives society.

Nasheed, dressed in an open-neck striped shirt and dark chinos, sat in the front row. The lights dimmed and scenes of environmental mayhem unfolded on the screen: Sydney Opera House in flames, ice sheets crashing into the seas, deserts spreading and forests burning.

Thus the people of the Maldives had their first glimpse of Franny Armstrong's documentary, The Age of Stupid, in which Pete Postlethwaite plays the last man left alive in a post-apocalyptic, climate-fried world.

The film is scrappy but passionate, a classic example of agit-prop cinema. But in the dripping night heat of Male, The Age of Stupid had a very different effect on its audience than it has had in the west. Its message seemed direct and immediate, a call to arms. Nor is it hard to understand such emotion. The islands that make up the Maldives are threatened with complete inundation, probably by the end of the century, as ice sheets melt and sea levels rise catastrophically, thanks to global warming.

The islands stand less than a couple of metres above sea level. In fact, their highest point, at 2.3 metres, is the "lowest high point" for any nation on Earth. It won't take much to inundate them. Hence the impact of the film which left its audience desperate for reassurance from their president as he moved to a microphone stand in the centre of the ballroom.

"If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy," Nasheed told them. "And so today, I announce that the Maldives will become the first carbon-neutral country in the world."

The announcement was a typically slick PR exercise by Nasheed. He had only been propelled into power a few weeks earlier in a national vote that had made him "the world's first democratically elected president of a 100% Muslim country", as he puts it.

Yet he was already revealing himself to be an adroit and effective operator. The former investigative journalist, jailed six times by his authoritarian predecessor, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and made an Amnesty prisoner of conscience in 1991, has begun making waves – in every sense.

Apart from his pledge to turn the Maldives – a collection of atolls and islands in the Indian Ocean that have become one of the world's most luxurious tourist resorts – into a carbon-neutral state, he has revealed that he has embarked on an ambitious campaign to buy up land – in India, Sri Lanka or Australia – on which he will build a New Maldives to replace the old one when it disappears under the waves. This will be achieved by using the country's vast tourism revenues to establish "a sovereign wealth fund" to relocate its people.

"Our actions will be a template, an action kit for other nations across the world," he said recently.

Last week Nasheed – or "Anni" as he is generally known – was at it again. First, he wowed the Conservative party conference in Manchester with a flawlessly delivered speech – typically presented without notes – on the importance of centre-right politics when it comes to saving the world. Then he topped this performance by announcing that this Saturday he will chair the world's first underwater cabinet meeting.

The aim of this remarkable plan is to raise global consciousness about the issues that must be hammered out at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen this December, he says. Thus Nasheed's ministers will don wetsuits and air tanks in six days' time, gather in the shallow waters off the island of Girifushi, and then get down to the business of governing the Maldives underwater – mainly by communicating through hand gestures. One minister, for education, has already had to pull out after diving experts announced he was not fit enough to take part.

The meeting will, as some observers have noted rather sardonically, bring politics in the Maldives, literally, to a new low. As one official remarked: "The paperwork should be challenging if nothing else."

The idea of an underwater cabinet meeting is certainly gimmicky but it will focus attention on a nation that stands to suffer more than any other from global warming. The Maldives could, quite simply, be wiped off the face of the Earth. "Unless something is done, my grandchildren will find these islands have completely disappeared under the waves," Nasheed said last week. Hence those undersea meetings and those carefully organised screenings.

Mohamed Nasheed was born in Male in May 1967, the son of a prosperous businessman. He was educated at Majeediyya secondary school in the Maldives before continuing his studies at a school in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1981 and then, a year later, at Dauntsey's school in Wiltshire where he sat his A-levels. Afterwards, he took a degree in marine studies at Liverpool John Moores University.

He returned to the Maldives in the late 1980s – and ran straight into trouble. He founded his own magazine, Sangu, and published a series of investigative reports about President Gayoom's regime, which he accused of being corrupt and guilty of a string of human rights abuses. After the fifth issue, Gayoom had had enough. Police raided the magazine's offices and arrested Nasheed. The 23-year-old spent several months in solitary confinement, accused of attempting to overthrow the government.

These allegations and bouts of harassment were repeated over the next 10 years. "I have personally experienced the worst that a malicious regime can contrive in order to suppress its people," he told the Conservative conference last week. "I was imprisoned on 16 different occasions and spent a total of six years in jail. Of these, I spent 18 months in solitary confinement."

The saddest aspect was that he missed the births of his two daughters, he said. "It was a tough reminder of a fundamental truth… that the freedom of the individual should not be destroyed at the whim of an over-mighty state." The remark, predictability, sent the Tory conference into ovation overdrive. But then Nasheed knows how to work a crowd, if nothing else.

In 2005, Nasheed fled the Maldives to Britain. You could "always talk to a western government about democracy", he said. He returned to his homeland after a few months, however, and in 2008 stood against Gayoom – then Asia's longest serving president – in the Maldives first ever democratic elections. Nashood won, with 54% of the votes.

He has since shown a striking sureness of action, though his short reign has not been without its critics. His remarks in Manchester last week, aimed to gee along his centre-right allies, together with his plans for underwater cabinet meetings and for moving the entire population to a promised land free of the threat of inundation, have led to accusations that he is a little light on political substance and too gimmicky for his own good.

Nasheed is scaring off investors, say opponents who include his predecessor, Gayoom. "This man is so hellbent on hogging the media limelight that he is forgetting to do his job, which is to run the country," said a spokesman for the former president.

Such criticism reeks of sour grapes, of course. Nevertheless, it is questionable just how far Nasheed can go for his country. Just who will sell him the land where he can build his New Maldives? And just what good will it do to make his nation carbon-neutral? Providing answers to these questions will not be easy, though in many ways they distract from the real purpose of Nasheed's plans.

We are all Maldivians, he argues. Every nation on the planet is threatened today by global warming. The Maldives and its inhabitants just happen to be first in line for the great calamity when it arrives. They may survive more than 100 years, of course, if rises in sea level remain modest. However, the oceans will continue to rise throughout next century and probably the one after it, scientists warn. The islands will therefore have to face their watery fate either in the 21st century or the 22nd, or even in the 23rd.

The actions of Mohamed Nasheed are therefore aimed at stimulating action by the west in the hope his country can reap some collateral benefit when a programme for dealing effectively with climate change is eventually hammered out. As he says: "If scientists are not able to save the Maldives, then they won't be able to save the world."

Source: guardian.co.uk

Maldives urges UN Member States to take critical action to combat climate change

The President of the Maldives implored world leaders gathered at the United Nations to urgently help the group of islands he governs in the middle of the Indian Ocean fight the menace of global warming, in a message to the General Assembly today.

“The threats posed to the Maldives from climate change are well-known,” President Mohamed Nasheed told the second day of the Assembly’s annual high-level debate at UN Headquarters in New York.

As beaches are lost to rising seas, houses to storm surges, jobs as fish stocks dwindle, and lives lost to more frequent extreme weather events, the scattering of islands becomes harder and harder to govern “until a point is reached when we must consider abandoning our homeland,” said Mr. Nasheed.

Calling on world leaders “to protect the future of front-line countries like the Maldives,” he said an ambitious new treaty on greenhouse gas reductions must be reached at December’s UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, which seeks to limit average global temperature increases to less than 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

“To do otherwise would be to sign the death warrant for the 300,000 Maldivians,” stressed Mr. Nasheed.

“But, the Maldives is determined to do what we can to survive,” he said referring to the archipelago’s commitment to be the first carbon-neutral country in 10 years time.

“In order to do that, we are determined to formulate a survival-kit, a carbon-neutral manual that would enable others to replicate in order that all of us together might just about save ourselves from climate catastrophe.”

Mr. Nasheed also hoped to invite some of the States most affected by climate change to the Maldives this November to “reinforce our determination to leave no stone unturned to ensure our survival.”

In addition, he said that the nascent democracy, which held its first ever multi-party presidential elections last year needed help from Member States in consolidating democracy and establishing a secure, prosperous and equitable society for the country.

Mr. Nasheed said he was thankful to be the first democratically-elected President of the Maldives to attend the General Assembly debate, many of which in the past he had spent bound up in a cell for his beliefs about freedom.

Source: un.org

MAAYA THILA, Maldives - Since climate change fears first gripped the globe, tourists have flocked to the Maldives to enjoy the islands'

Do they really need to rush?

Scientists have long warned that the Maldives, an archipelago nation of nearly 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean, will be wiped out by rising sea levels in the coming decades. President Mohamed Nasheed is so convinced of his nation's demise he has proposed relocating all 350,000 inhabitants to other countries. On average, the islands are 7 feet above sea level, making them the lowest-lying nation on Earth.

Most experts agree the Maldives have plenty to worry about: In the worst-case scenario, if global sea levels rise higher and faster than expected, the islands may indeed be swallowed up.

But some recent data challenge the widespread belief that the islands are destined to disappear - and a few mainstream scientists are even cautiously optimistic about their chances for surviving relatively intact beyond the next century.

"The outlook for the Maldives is not all doom and gloom," said Paul Kench of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "The islands won't be the same, but they will still be there."

Kench said his studies of the Maldives show the islands can adjust their shape in response to environmental changes, such as the rising seas and warmer temperatures predicted in the next century.

Kench suggests the islands might move onto their reefs and build vertically, offsetting the potential threat of sea level rises. His research - published together with other scientists from Australia, New Zealand and the Maldives - shows some islands have rebuilt themselves as much as 1.6 feet higher. Their studies have been published in recent years in journals including Geology and the Journal of Geophysical Research.

"It's quite convincing work and seems to be quite widely accepted by the scientific community," said Andrew Cooper, a professor of coastal studies at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.

"They have detailed geological evidence that this kind of growth has happened before in the past. ... I think the question of the Maldives being completely wiped out may be overstated."

Following the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami, many scientists assumed the Maldives would be damaged. But Kench and his colleagues not only found little evidence of island erosion, but also that the tsunami had washed sediment ashore, making some islands taller than they were before the catastrophe.

Kench warned, however, that while only a small number of Maldivian islands may not be able to adapt to rising sea levels, those are unfortunately the ones where many people live: Male, the nation's capital, and Hulule. Residents of those islands will probably need to relocate to another country or move to other Maldivian islands that won't disappear so quickly, he said.

Building taller and moving to higher ground are examples of a hot trend in climate change policy: emphasizing adaptation.

While much global warming work aims to limit emissions, adaptation advocates argue for the need to combat the inevitable effects of climate change through forward planning and construction. That includes moving people, building sea walls, and new construction techniques.

Sea levels worldwide have been steadily rising, except in a handful of places, including the Maldives. But in the last 50 years, some data from satellite pictures and tide measurements suggest sea levels in the Maldives have dropped by as much as 12 inches.

"That was definitely unexpected," said Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. Overpeck said the decline in the Maldives' sea levels is probably due to local factors like ocean temperatures and currents.

Such data is inconclusive, however - and with few available records, the Indian Ocean remains one of the world's least understood oceans.

Jianjun Yin, an assistant research scientist who monitors sea levels at Florida State University, said the drop in the Maldives could be caused by increased evaporation in the Indian Ocean. Evaporation makes water more dense, thus lowering sea levels.

Yin said the Maldives' defiance of the global trend of rising sea levels could be temporary. "I don't think the Maldives will disappear in a few decades, but maybe in another hundred years it will become a very serious situation," he said.

Other scientists think coral reefs may help save the islands. Under normal conditions, reefs can grow inches every year.

Source: zwire.com

Maldives may endure beyond this century

Since climate change fears first gripped the globe, tourists have flocked to the Maldives to enjoy the islands' spectacular vistas before they vanish.

Do they really need to rush?

Scientists have long warned that the Maldives, an archipelago nation of nearly 1 200 islands in the Indian Ocean, will be wiped out by rising sea levels in the coming decades. President Mohamed Nasheed is so convinced of his nation's demise he has proposed relocating all 350 000 inhabitants to other countries. On average, the islands are two metres above sea level, making them the lowest-lying nation on Earth.

Most experts agree the Maldives have plenty to worry about: In the worst-case scenario, if global sea levels rise higher and faster than expected, the islands may indeed be swallowed up.

'That is a huge question which limits our ability to predict what is going to happen'

But some recent data challenge the widespread belief that the islands are destined to disappear - and a few mainstream scientists are even cautiously optimistic about their chances for surviving relatively intact beyond the next century.

"The outlook for the Maldives is not all doom and gloom," said Paul Kench of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "The islands won't be the same, but they will still be there."

Kench said his studies of the Maldives show the islands can adjust their shape in response to environmental changes, such as the rising seas and warmer temperatures predicted in the next century.

Kench suggests the islands might move onto their reefs and build vertically, offsetting the potential threat of sea level rises. His research - published together with other scientists from Australia, New Zealand and the Maldives - shows some islands have rebuilt themselves as much as 49cm higher. Their studies have been published in recent years in journals including Geology and the Journal of Geophysical Research.

"It's quite convincing work and seems to be quite widely accepted by the scientific community," said Andrew Cooper, a professor of coastal studies at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland.

'If you make a mistake, you lose an island'

"They have detailed geological evidence that this kind of growth has happened before in the past. ... I think the question of the Maldives being completely wiped out may be overstated."

Following the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami, many scientists assumed the Maldives would be damaged. But Kench and his colleagues not only found little evidence of island erosion, but also that the tsunami had washed sediment ashore, making some islands taller than they were before the catastrophe.

Kench warned, however, that while only a small number of Maldivian islands may not be able to adapt to rising sea levels, those are unfortunately the ones where many people live: Male, the nation's capital, and Hulule. Residents of those islands will probably need to relocate to another country or move to other Maldivian islands that won't disappear so quickly, he said.

Building taller and moving to higher ground are examples of a hot trend in climate change policy: emphasizing adaptation.

While much global warming work aims to limit emissions, adaptation advocates argue for the need to combat the inevitable effects of climate change through forward planning and construction. That includes moving people, building sea walls, and new construction techniques.

Sea levels worldwide have been steadily rising, except in a handful of places, including the Maldives. But in the last 50 years, some data from satellite pictures and tide measurements suggest sea levels in the Maldives have dropped by as much as 30cm.

"That was definitely unexpected," said Jonathan Overpeck, director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth at the University of Arizona. Overpeck said the decline in the Maldives' sea levels is probably due to local factors like ocean temperatures and currents.

Such data is inconclusive, however - and with few available records, the Indian Ocean remains one of the world's least understood oceans.

Jianjun Yin, an assistant research scientist who monitors sea levels at Florida State University, said the drop in the Maldives could be caused by increased evaporation in the Indian Ocean. Evaporation makes water more dense, thus lowering sea levels.

Yin said the Maldives' defiance of the global trend of rising sea levels could be temporary. "I don't think the Maldives will disappear in a few decades, but maybe in another hundred years it will become a very serious situation," he said.

Other scientists think coral reefs may help save the islands. Under normal conditions, reefs can grow inches (centimeters) every year, allowing them to keep up with at least some sea level rise. The reefs form natural barriers that protect islands from being eroded by rising sea levels.

But rising tides and temperatures may conspire to stunt the corals' growth. As sea levels rise, light conditions underwater worsen, making it difficult for the reefs to expand; their health also depend upon relatively cool waters.

"One of the $64 000 questions is whether corals will be able to grow fast enough to keep up with sea level rises," Cooper said.

Many scientists estimate that by 2100, global sea levels will rise by 91cm, due to melting ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica. But because no one knows how fast these will melt, that figure comes with a significant margin of error.

"That is a huge question which limits our ability to predict what is going to happen in the Maldives," said Steve Nerem, a professor at the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research.

Scientists are unsure if water from the melting ice caps might hang around Greenland and Antarctica, or if they will spread out across the Earth's oceans - and if they do, how fast that spread will happen.

Though uncertainty about future sea level rises may be good news for the Maldives - and for tourists seeking their sandy beaches - most scientists urge the country to make contingency plans.

"We just don't know enough to be confident one way or the other," Overpeck said. "And in this case, if you make a mistake, you lose an island. You lose a nation." - Sapa

Source:

Will Maldives cease to exist, engulfed by seas rising from the effects of global warming?

Is the Maldives, a country of about 1,200 coral islets and 400,000 people in the Indian Ocean, southwest of Sri Lanka, living on borrowed time? Is it likely to be wiped off the face of the earth in another 40 years, engulfed by seas rising from the effects of global warming?

I’m sure there are people — politicians, businessmen, even scientists — who’d ridicule this notion and the very idea of global warming, but for the Maldives, one of the world’s smallest nations, the fear is almost mortal. The country feels it’s living in the very jaws of death and has pleaded with the world, on many occasions, to come to its rescue.

In 1992, speaking at the UN Earth Summit, the then Maldives’ president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom declared his fear of doom in these words: “I stand before you as a representative of an endangered people. We are told that, as a result of global warming and sea-level rise, my country, the Maldives, may sometime during the next century disappear from the face of the earth.”

In late 2007, at the UN climate change meeting in Bali, Gayoom sounded desperate. “Over half of our islands,” he said, “are eroding at an alarming rate. In some cases, island communities have had to be relocated to safer islands. Without immediate action, the long-term habitation of our tiny islands is in serious doubt.”

But behind these frantic pleas is a growing realisation that action by the global community just isn’t round the corner. The Maldives was the first country to sign the Kyoto protocol to fight global warming, but others haven’t quite shared its enthusiasm. So it has decided to take matters in its own hands and do whatever it can to the best of its ability.

Its immediate goal is to become a fully carbon-neutral country by 2020, switching from fossil fuel to 100 per cent renewable energy sources. It’s thinking of a mix of wind turbines and rooftop solar panels, plus power plants burning nothing but coconut husks. Its long-term goal is to save up enough to buy a new homeland elsewhere and relocate its entire population before the crunch comes.

While carbon neutrality isn’t difficult to achieve, how feasible is the idea of a new homeland? The Maldives’ new president, Mohamed Nasheed, says the savings are to come mainly from revenues earned from tourism. They could. Tourism is a major segment of the Maldives’ economy, accounting for over 30 per cent of its GDP, and the more than 600,000 tourists who visit every year are mostly high-spenders and long-stayers.

But where does one find an alternative homeland for an entire nation? It won’t be easy to find an island that’s high and safe and uninhabited or that’s not a nation already or part of a nation. And though the Maldives has held relocation talks with Sri Lanka, India, and Australia, would any country want to carve out a part of its territory and sell it to another?

Perhaps, the Maldives should start looking for a solution that’s more practical and pertinent. The basis for such a solution already exists in the form of an artificial island that’s being built just off the country’s main inhabited island of Male. It’s called Hulhumale, or New Male, and many consider it a smart answer to the Maldives’ problem of survival.

The Maldives is nowhere more than six feet above the sea level, and seas rising from a global snowmelt could easily swamp it. Memories are still fresh of the devastating 1987 floods that submerged most of Male and the December 2004 tsunami, when 53 of the country’s 199 inhabited islands suffered severe damage — 20 were totally destroyed, and 19 of its 87 luxury resorts were badly mauled.

After the 1987 floods, a frantic government responded by erecting a concrete sea wall against the waves, which now rings Male. However, since the concrete tetrapods can only soften the blow and not thwart the surges altogether, the government also began, in 1997, to build Hulhumale as an alternative refuge several feet higher than the existing height of the rest of the country.

Hulhumale, about four times the size of Male, is actually a shallow lagoon being filled with sand dredged from the ocean floor. Its straight, wide streets, modern apartments, and more than basic facilities have already attracted several thousand people to move there. More are willing to follow to escape from Male’s congestion.

For the Maldives living in fear of doom, this is a possible way out. There are other shallow lagoons in the island chain where more Hulhumales could be built, if needed, to protect its people and economy. It’s going to be costly, no doubt, but at least it makes more sense than looking to buy a new homeland, and the UN, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank might be called upon to help.

Source: business-standard.com

Maldives president asks The Queen to stop islands sinking

Mohamed Nasheed, the president of Maldives, on Monday was scheduled to ask the help of Queen Elizabeth in combating the climate change and rising sea levels that threaten to submerge his island nation.

The president of the archipelago, who is on an official visit to the UK, said he would discuss the potential consequences of global warming on his country while at dinner with the Queen at Windsor Castle. He said he would seek advice from the monarch, as head of the Commonwealth, on a possible way out of the crisis.

"I will ask her for advice - about what she thinks and also how we may be able to organise ourselves," he told The Daily Telegraph.

"I'm sure her majesty would be very aware of the predicament that low-lying Commonwealth countries like the Maldives would be facing," he said. "In the past she has always responded very affectionately towards the Maldives and I'm sure she would find appropriate measures and appropriate actions on these issues."

The Maldives, one of the lowest countries in the world, is likely to be severely affected by rising sea levels as ice caps melt. If predictions by the International Panel on Climate Change are correct, most of the country's 1,192 islands will be submerged by the end of the century.

Mr Nasheed is also due this week to talk to the Kamalesh Sharma, Secretary General of the Commonwealth, and John Ashton, special adviser on Climate Change. The move comes amid climate change talks in Bonn in the run-up to the United Nations summit in Copenhagen in December which aims to forge a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol.

After being sworn in as president in November, Mr Nasheed said he would consider buying a new homeland to relocate his people in the face of the threat. And last month, he announced his country aimed to be the world's first carbon neutral country by switching to renewable energies as an example to other countries.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

How to tackle climate change — the Maldives example

The tiny Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives will become carbon-neutral within 10 years. This was the pledge made by Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed on March 15.

The low-lying country will be among the first in the world to be inundated by rising sea levels caused by human-induced climate change. The highest point in the chain of 1200 islands and coral atolls is just 1.8 metres above sea-level.

The latest research indicates that if present rates of carbon emissions continue, global warming will likely cause sea level rises of about one metre by 2100. This is close to double the rise predicted by most scientists just two years ago.

At the request of the Maldives government, a plan for carbon neutrality has been developed for the Republic of Maldives by British climate writers Chris Goodall (author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet) and Mark Lynas (author of the best-selling book Six Degrees). An outline of Goodall and Lynas’s plan has been posted at .

Carbon neutrality

The plan focuses on the replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy for electricity, most land and sea transport, and household cooking by 2020.

About 160 wind turbines will provide the bulk of electricity for the inhabited islands. Wind power will be supplemented with solar power farms built in shallow island lagoons. These two power sources are expected to generate considerably more electricity than the Maldives currently consumes.

To account for the variability of wind and solar power, Goodall and Lynas suggest the country invests in a biomass combustion plant, mainly using coconut husks, for backup energy needs in the capital Male. Outside the capital, backup energy supply can be secured by storing energy in lithium phosphate batteries, they say. Currently, diesel-powered generators are a major source of energy on most of the islands.

About US$100 million will be needed to rework the electricity transmission network to make the most of renewable supply and to improve energy efficiency.

Under the plan, diesel fuel used in larger boats can be switched with power from renewable electricity. Petrol used to power cars and smaller boats can be sharply reduced via the steady replacement of the combustion engine with electric battery-powered vehicles. In the long run, electricity will be a far cheaper option than petrol for land and sea transport, Goodall and Lynas say.

Wood and kerosene are used by most people in the Maldives for cooking fuel. Goodall and Lynas suggest the introduction of “highly efficient closed stoves” for remote islands. For homes and tourist resorts with access to the grid, the replacement of older stoves with electric-powered alternatives will be needed. Solar cookers are another option for household use.

The release of methane gas from organic waste is responsible for a estimated 20% of the nation’s total emissions. This can be mostly eliminated through organic composting techniques. The compost can be used to improve the Maldives’s poor soil fertility and increase local crop yields.

Outside of their small fishing industry, the Maldives economy is almost completely dependent on foreign tourism. After electricity, the next most important source of carbon emissions is from aviation.

Goodall and Lynas propose that the Maldives could offset aviation emissions by buying, and then cancelling, emissions permits from the European Union carbon trading scheme.

This is the most questionable part of the ambitious plan. The EU’s carbon trading scheme is widely discredited for failing to reduce emission while allowing speculators to make windfall profits from buying and selling the “right to pollute”.

Action from industrialised countries in sharply cutting emissions is the only real “offset” the Maldives can rely on.

A larger problem is that the entire plan will cost at least $1.1 billion over a decade — far more than the Maldives can afford.

The plan would only be possible if the country were to receive loans from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank — bodies notorious for impoverishing, rather than helping, countries in the global South.

Despite the cost of setting up renewable energy infrastructure, Goodall and Lynas predict the switch to renewables would save the Maldives money in the long term. Cutting the country’s dependence on oil would reduce the nation’s energy bill by $50 to $130 million every year.

No excuse for inaction

The announcement from the Maldives government came just days after the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change had met in Copenhagen in early March. The key findings of the conference were summarised in a blunt press statement on March 12.

Climate change is much worse than we thought, the scientists concluded. The “worst-case” scenarios outlined in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report are being reached, or even surpassed, right now.

“For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. … There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts”, the statement said.

“Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid ‘dangerous climate change’ … There is no excuse for inaction.”

The conference gave further scientific backing to what growing numbers of people already fear. The planet is perilously close to passing climate tipping points which, if crossed, will provoke runaway global warming and threaten billions of lives.

The Arctic ice cap — one of the Earth’s natural “air-conditioners” — is melting. The oceans are warming, turning the planet’s greatest carbon-sink into a carbon emitter. The Siberian permafrost is retreating, releasing mega-tonnes of trapped methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful that carbon dioxide, up into the atmosphere.

The world’s glaciers — irreplaceable sources of fresh water for billions of people — are shrinking rapidly. The huge ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica are becoming fragile; their melting would herald further rises in sea levels and turn millions of people into climate refugees. Weather systems are changing in unpredictable ways; extreme weather events are on the rise.

Urgent, international action to end the burning of fossil fuels for energy is required now to avert the climate change threat. Despite this, wealthy polluting nations such as Australia continue to make excuses for inaction.

‘The choice is that stark’

On March 17, Nasheed outlined the reasoning behind the Maldives’s ambitious plan for carbon-neutrality in a video address streamed to the British launch of the forthcoming feature film about climate change by director Franny Armstrong, The Age of Stupid.

“If we can achieve this — a small, relatively poor country — there can be no excuse from the rich, industrial nations who claim that going green is too complex, too expensive or too much bother”, Nasheed said.

“Now the world has an opportunity to come together and prevent the looming environmental catastrophe. That opportunity is called Copenhagen.

“And let’s be very frank about this: Copenhagen can be one of two things.

“It can be an historic event where the world unites against carbon pollution, in a collective spirit of co-operation and collaboration.

“Or, Copenhagen can be a suicide pact.

“The choice is that stark.

“My message to you, my message to the world, is simply this: please, don’t be stupid.”

If the Copenhagen conference in December fails to set emissions cuts that can restore a safe climate, then the fault will lie with the governments of the developed world, who are desperately resisting change.

At the last international conference on climate change, held in the Polish city of Poznan late last year, the Australian government helped to sabotage a binding international agreement.

The Australian delegation chaired a bloc of some of the world’s biggest polluters, including the US, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Canada. The bloc was dedicated to stopping agreement on a proposed 25%-40% emissions reduction by 2020.

Unfortunately, they were successful.

The Rudd government’s push to legislate sickeningly low emissions cuts of 5%-15% by 2020 is designed to undermine the Copenhagen conference and stop it from adopting the serious cuts urged by the Maldives and other countries in the global South.

This reflects the reality of climate policy in Australia: the biggest, wealthiest polluters call the shots. The Rudd government defends them, while pretending to be serious about climate change.

Both the government and the powerful fossil fuel interests must be confronted, and their agenda defeated, if we hope to secure a safe climate.

Source: www.greenleft.org.au

Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish. [Read More]

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Protected paradise?

The Seychelles is one of those tropical paradise destinations that attracts wealthy holidaymakers and ultrahoneymooners. Located in the Indian Ocean, 1,000 miles off Africa's east coast, this otherwordly archipelago of 115 islands - some made of low-lying coral and reef atolls, others of ancient granite - offers textbook -white powder sand, aqua waters and a balmy climate with temperatures rarely lower than 24°C nor higher than 32°C. It is more remote and rugged than Mauritius or the Maldives, yet it is has regular flight connections direct to the capital of Mahé from Dubai (four hours away) and the UK (10 hours). It also sits in a time zone between Asia and Europe with working hours that overlap with those of major financial centres.

Not surprisingly, property on the islands has long been coveted by foreign househunters. Butthe market has only opened up in the past four years, following a legislative change that allows non-locals to buy into new, high-end developments. This is designed to promote the right kind of new construction and ensure that locals - who tend to live in two- to three-bedroom traditional wooden or contemporary concrete houses on the main islands of Mahé, Praslin and La Digue - are not priced out of the market.

As a result, a host of new residential resorts is springing up. The first to launch, in early 2006, was Eden Island, a high-density development on a man-made island beside Mahé, followed by the Banyan Tree Residences on Mahé. Last April Dubai-based Kingdom Hotel Investments (KHI) announced it was opening up a group of 23 Raffles-branded residences and estates on Praslin alongside a soon-to-be-constructed Raffles Resort and, in May, Four Seasons Private Residences launched an upscale collection of 28 individual villas on the south-west side of Mahé at Petit Anse. The Per Aquum group has also revealed plans for a project called Zil Pasyon on its own private island, Félicité, with 28 ultra-sleek hilltop residences.

"The Seychelles is regarded as the most beautiful group of islands in the world, it is not too accessible and it is a new marketplace for real estate, so there is a long way to go for appreciation, as well as huge rental potential," says David Sparrow, director of sales for the Zil Pasyon development. "There will never be that much supply but demand will continue to grow."

There is one catch, however. The new homes on the island are only affordable for the seriously wealthy. "We are aimed at people with such significant wealth and such diverse portfolios that they are not so affected by the global credit crunch," says James Davies at Hamptons International, the agency handling sales for the Four Seasons. "A lot of them are worth as much as $50m and many are significantly wealthier than that."

Indeed, even as recession grips most world economies, Seychelles developers and agents think their market could remain strong. And perhaps it's true. Within 10 days of the Four Seasons project announcement, 15 villas sold for an estimated combined total of $150m. Buyers are international and have backgrounds from hedge funds to publishing. The starting price for the remaining villas is $7m (prices are routinely quoted in dollars) and each sits on a plot of up to two hectares, with infinity pools, gardens, steam showers and Bose entertainment systems.

Zil Pasyon, which is Creole for "isle of passion", targets a similar buyer. Entry prices start at $3.8m for a 612 sq metre, three-bedroom property and the villas have plunge pools, 90in plasma televisions, "castle" entries with drawbridges and moats, plus exclusive access by private helicopter. "Our market is the ultra-high-net-worth individual - people looking for utmost privacy and services with a combination of raw nature and architectural design," says Tania Horoupian, marketing manager.

The Raffles development is slightly less stratospherically priced at $2.8m- $5.8m for three- to five-bedroom villas of 325 sq metres to 550 sq metres, with private infinity pools and big ocean-view verandas. The Banyan Tree Residences are in the same category, with one- and two-bedroom hill and beach villas costing from $1.5m to $2.9m, though a second phase of larger, more expensive properties is set to go on sale soon. So far, 50 per cent of the first group has sold to Asian, Middle Eastern and north European buyers, "most of which tend to be between 45 and 55, affluent businessmen and -women and semi-retired couples," says Robert Green at Cluttons, which is marketing the project. "The majority have families and own more than one holiday home already."

Properties at Eden Island are meanwhile the most affordable in the islands. A marina development of 450 apartments, maisons and villas, designed to exploit the Seychelles' world-class snorkelling and yachting offerings, it offers owners their own moorings as well as electric vehicles to get around, with prices starting at about $400,000 for a one-bedroom unit. Half of buyers have been South African, followed by the French and British, Russians and Italians.

Brad Berry at KHI spells out the appeal of the Seychelles. "It is an exclusive sanctuary that is totally untrampled. It is not busy, there are perfect beaches and it [has been] a quite unbranded place [with] no big international real estate or retail brands."

There are financial reasons to buy too. Acquisition of a property enables the owner to establish an off-shore entity and residency is immediate. There are no capital gains or inheritance taxes and the islands' economy is also stable, allowing for a safe, laid-back living environment.

And, in spite of all the construction, the Seychelles government seems keen to protect its biggest asset. Its 2001 Vision 21 mission statement set stringent guidelines on construction and environmental protection and there are conservation laws designed to keep each island's eco-system in its unspoiled state, with 50 per cent of land set aside as protected reserve, including two Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) World Heritage sites - Praslin's prehistoric Vallée de Mai, a sort of Jurassic park for plants, and Aldabra, one of the the largest raised coral atolls on earth.

Residents, such as Alex Hurren, 32, who bought a three-bedroom flat in Eden Island for $530,000 in May 2007, feel understandably blessed to own a little piece of this particular paradise. "The Seychelles is an amazing destination with an ideal climate," he says. "It is perfect for all sorts of activities, from island-hopping to golf and fishing."

Nigel Guenier, 70, a retired yachtie with a penthouse in the same development, agrees. "It is gorgeous, it has very little crime, the beaches are second-to-none, it is like the West Indies without the hurricanes [and it] is the best place in the world for sailing."

If you have more than half a million dollars to spend on a second home, you could own there too.

Source: ft.com

Rising sea levels 'could spark conflict over energy and food reserves'

Rising sea levels caused by climate change are threatening to destabilise island nations and spark conflict across the world over energy and food reserves, the Australian military has claimed.

Most parts of the Maldives are just 1.5m above water and the government are struggling to prevent beach erosion. Photo: AP

A report revealed "environmental stress" had increased the risk of conflicts over food and resources in the region. It predicted warmer temperatures would change the location of South East Asian fishing grounds, leading to conflict over fishing rights, and lead to an increase in climate refugees fleeing the Pacific's sinking atolls.

Environmental changes would "reinforce existing concerns regarding land availability, economic development and control over resources", it said, multiplying the threats faced by fragile states and increasing the chance they would fail.

But the biggest threat to global security was the melting Arctic ice caps, which would give rise to a potentially dangerous international race for valuable sea oil and gas deposits, the report said.

"The Arctic is melting, potentially making the extraction of undersea energy deposits commercially viable. Conflict is a remote possibility if these disputes are not resolved peacefully." Climate change has already been linked to the escalating fight for the world's natural resources, including an increasingly precious commodity – dry land.

In November, the newly elected president of the Maldives announced his country would begin to set aside a portion of its billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland because rising seas were threatening to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees. Most parts of the Maldives are just 1.5m above water. The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise up to 59cm by 2100, due to global warming.

Mohamed Nasheed said the chain of 1,200 islands and coral atolls will be engulfed by the ocean if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels.

But whether Mr Nasheed will be able to find a new home for his citizens is another question.

Resource-hungry nations are already snapping up large tracts of agricultural land in poor Asian and African nations.

High global oil and commodity prices, the biofuels boom and the economic downturn are prompting import-reliant countries to take action to protect their sources of food.

China and South Korea, which are both short on arable land have signed up the rights to swathes of territory in Asia and Africa.

In one of the biggest and most recent deals, South Korea's Daewoo Logistics said it would invest about $6 billion to develop 3.2 million acres (1.3 million hectares) in Madagascar – almost half the size of Belgium.

The report into the effects of climate change by Australia's Defence Force, predicted that disputes over access to scarce food resources could mean increasing the country's navy in the seas to its north.

The report said climate change would "increase demands for the Australian Defence Force to be deployed on additional stabilisation, post-conflict reconstruction and disaster relief operations in the future".

Source: telegraph.co.uk

Islanders Plead at Climate Talks to Be Saved From Rising Seas

Island countries from Grenada in the Caribbean to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are telling delegates at the United Nations climate-change talks this week that their lands may be swamped by rising seas and more powerful storms unless global warming is curbed.

Warmer temperatures are melting icecaps, expanding the volume of oceans and sending more intense hurricanes toward Grenada. Higher tides in the Tuvalu islands between Hawaii and Australia have started making groundwater too salty to drink for its 12,000 residents. The Maldives may buy land elsewhere and move all its islanders should rising waters engulf their land.

“We are already in danger -- it’s not that we Maldivians ever want to leave,” Amjad Abdulla, director-general of the nation’s environment ministry, said in an interview at the UN global-warming talks in Poznan, Poland. Relocation plans for the 300,000 residents from the low-lying atolls south of India are being drawn up for “a worst-case scenario.”

Delegates at Poznan are negotiating a “shared vision” to open the way for a new global-warming treaty to be signed a year from now in Copenhagen. Island-state envoys say they fear an agreement struck before talks wrap up on Dec. 12 won’t ensure their survival, or be backed by pledges from industrialized nations that release the most heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year predicted sea levels will rise 18 to 59 centimeters (7 inches to two feet) by 2100, having risen 17 centimeters during the last century. The Maldives’s highest point is about 10 feet above sea level. The panel also said tropical cyclones are likely to increase in intensity as temperature warm.

2 Degrees Too Much

The 27-member European Union has proposed curbing global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre- industrial times.

A 2-degree limit won’t guarantee the future of the lowest- lying nations, said Leon Charles, a Grenadian delegate. “Two degrees is really not a safe level for small island states,” Charles said. “For many of them it would be like a death sentence in the long run.”

The EU, the biggest group of nations that already accepted binding emissions limits under the Kyoto treaty, also asks the developed world to cut them 20 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

The “shared vision” blueprint won’t likely include precise numbers on reductions by 2020, U.S. delegate Harlan Watson said at Poznan, which lies halfway between Berlin and Warsaw.

A 2-degree goal is “suicide” for islands that rise little above sea level, Selwin Hart, a spokesman from Barbados for the Alliance of Small Island States, told delegates on Dec. 2.

‘Our Extinction’

The 43-member Alliance of Small Islands group wants a 1.5- degree limit, and “agreeing to a goal that results in our extinction is not something we’re prepared to do,” Hart said.

A temperature gain of 2 degrees would kill off up to 85 percent of corals, raise sea levels, increase tropical diseases and intensify storms further, said Charles, climate-change adviser to Grenada’s finance ministry.

Ocean water expands when it’s warmer, occupying more volume as temperatures rise. The seas also have risen as the Greenland and Arctic ice sheets melt.

The UN climate panel also said temperatures have risen by 0.76 degrees since the 19th century and further gains of 1-2 degrees would result in the bleaching of most corals, a process that makes them more vulnerable to dying off.

“We’re living on coral reefs: The economy is fisheries and tourism and the coral reefs are the natural barriers from sea- level rise and storm surges,” Abdulla of the Maldives said. “If the coral reefs go, it means the death of a nation.”

As studies are carried out and the evidence stacks up that the small islands are in danger, politicians in richer nations may begin to change their stance, said Stephanie Tunmore, climate campaigner for the environmental group Greenpeace, in Poznan.

“The 2-degree target a few years ago was an incredibly radical position. It’s much more widely accepted now” and even 1.5 degrees may be endorsed, she said. “It’s very, very hard for them to say ‘we know this island and this island and these people will be obliterated.’ It becomes a moral imperative to act.”

Source: bloomberg.com

Island states seek tougher U.N. climate deal

A group of 43 small island states called on Wednesday for tougher goals for fighting global warming than those being considered at U.N. climate talks, saying that rising seas could wipe them off the map.

"We are not prepared to sign a suicide agreement that causes small island states to disappear," Selwin Hart of Barbados, a coordinator of the alliance of small island states, told Reuters at the 187-nation meeting.

The December 1-12 talks in Poznan, Poland, are reviewing progress at the half-way stage of a two-year push for a new U.N. treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. The new treaty is meant to be agreed by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen.

The 43 nations, including low-lying coral atolls from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, said global warming should be limited to a maximum of 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, below a 2.0 C goal by the European Union.

Average temperatures rose by about 0.7 Celsius last century and many scientists say that even the EU goal, the toughest under wide consideration, may already be out of reach because of surging emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

Hart said it was the first time that the alliance had set a common temperature goal. Rising temperatures and seas would damage corals, erode coasts, disrupt rainfall and spur more disease, they said.

Low-lying states such as Tuvalu and Kiribati say they risk being submerged by sea level rises, spurred by rising temperatures that could melt ice in Greenland and Antarctica. Warmer water also takes up more space than cold, raising levels.

"A 2 C increase compared to pre-industrial levels would have devastating consequences on small island developing states," the nations said in a joint statement.

CORALS

"My country is really suffering," said Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives. He said some people in the Maldives were already living in partly inundated homes.

Bernaditas Muller of the Philippines said a 2C rise would wipe out a third of the territory of her country. Rising seas would also swamp low-lying coasts from Bangladesh to Florida.

The small islands said their goal would mean that industrialized nations would have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and by more than 95 percent by 2050.

Such cuts are far deeper than under consideration by industrialized countries, facing additional problems in making new reductions because of the financial crisis.

The EU, for instance, is struggling to get approval for a plan to cuts of 20 percent below 1990 by 2020. U.S. President-elect Barack Obama aims to return U.S. emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 after a rise of 14 percent since 1990.

The U.N. Climate Panel said seas may rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-24 inches) this century and that sea levels are likely to keep on rising for centuries.

But some scientists say that may be an under-estimate.

"It's still likely that the average sea level will rise less than 1 meter by 2100 but higher figure cannot be excluded," said Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

He said that some studies indicated that seas could rise by up to about 1.55 meters by 2100 and 1.5-3.5 meters by 2300.

"If the Antarctic ice sheet melts down completely the global sea levels would rise by 57 meters (187 ft). For Greenland it's 7 meters," he said.

Source: www.reuters.com

Plan for new Maldives homeland

The president-elect of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, says he wants to buy a new homeland for his people.

He says that the gradual rise in sea levels caused by global warming means the Maldives islanders may eventually be forced to resettle elsewhere.

The Maldives is the lowest nation in the world. Its highest land is little more than two metres above sea level.

The United Nations estimates that sea levels may rise globally by nearly 60 centimetres this century.

Devastation fears

The Maldives comprise more than 1,000 islands and coral atolls surrounded by the clear waters of the Indian Ocean.

The white sandy beaches are a major tourist attraction bringing in billions of dollars every year.

Now Mohamed Nasheed, who will be sworn in as the country's first democratically elected president on Tuesday, has said that he will set up a fund to acquire land in other parts of the region.

Mr Nasheed's spokesman, Ibrahim Hussein Zaki, told the BBC's World Today programme that the new government had to take action.

"Global warming and environmental issues are issues of major concern to the Maldivian people. We are just about three feet (0.91 metre) above sea level," Mr Zaki said, speaking from the capital, Male.

"So any sea level rise could have a devastating effect on the people of the Maldives and their very survival".

Similar culture

Over the last century, sea levels around parts of the archipelago rose by nearly 20cm. Mr Nasheed fears that even a small rise could leave some islands inundated.

Mr Nasheed's plan is to create a "sovereign wealth fund" using tourism revenues to buy land so that future generations will have somewhere to rebuild their lives if they have to leave.

He wants somewhere within the region, where the culture is similar - possibly India or Sri Lanka.

His fears is that if he does not take action, the future descendents of the 300,000 islanders could become environmental refugees.

Source: BBC

Maldives saves for new homeland amid flooding fears

The Maldives' newly-elected president said in an interview Monday that his government will begin saving to buy a new homeland in case global warming causes the country to disappear into the sea.

Beloved by tourists for their white sandy beaches, palm trees and clear waters, the 1,192 coral islands that make up the Indian Ocean country risk devastation by rising sea levels caused by climate change.

Mohamed "Anni" Nasheed, who won the Maldives' first democratic presidential election last month, told The Guardian his government will start putting aside part of its billion-dollar annual tourism income in case the worst happens.

"We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome," he told the newspaper.

He added: "We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades."

Nasheed said he had already broached the subject with a number of countries and found them to be "receptive". India and Sri Lanka are targets because they had similar cultures and climates, while vast Australia was also an option.

He told the newspaper he intended to create a "sovereign wealth fund" from the money generated by tourism, much like Arab states had with oil revenues. "Kuwait might invest in companies -- we will invest in land," he said.

Outgoing president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Asia's longest-serving leader, launched a book in April to highlight the threat to the Maldives posed by global warming.

He said at the time that they could only adapt to the problem by relocating citizens to safer islands. The alternative, building protective walls on the 193 inhabited islands, was too expensive.

Source: AFP

With millions under threat, inaction is unethical

In a world preoccupied with issues of national sovereignty, global security and human rights, it is surprising that the international community remains so ambivalent in the face of a phenomenon - climate change - that threatens to rewrite borders, cause conflicts, and violate individual fundamental rights on a scale at least comparable with the major wars of the 20th century. It is also curious that in a world order built upon concepts of international law, solidarity and justice, the international community sits idly by while the Earth's greatest natural resource - the shared global ecosphere - is being critically undermined by the actions of a few privileged countries at the expense of the underprivileged many.

Oxfam International's groundbreaking report on "Climate Wrongs and Human Rights," published Tuesday, highlights these contradictions and couches them in demands for greater climate justice. The report demonstrates how climate change is violating the rights and freedoms of millions of people around the world, especially in vulnerable countries like the Maldives that bear almost no responsibility for a problem that threatens to consume them. In so doing, the report also responds to a call made this year in a United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution, sponsored by the Maldives, for information on how human rights such as the right to food, the right to water, the right to a culture, the right to housing, the right to work, the right to self-determination and even the right to life itself, are being undermined by climate change in communities around the world.

The Maldives is in a position to realize better than most the malign power of global warming. Our beautiful island nation comprises 1,190 tiny coral islands that stretch like a string of pearls across the Indian Ocean. Yet, the beauty of the Maldives is undermined by our acute vulnerability to climate change. As well as being small, all our islands are very low-lying, meaning that sea-level rise poses an existential threat to our civilization - a civilization that has existed for at least three and a half millennia. The fact that the sea is now perceived as a slowly encroaching threat to the Maldives is a tragic paradox when one considers that throughout our history, the sea and the life that it supports has been the life-blood of the nation. Yet today, rising sea temperatures and increased salination are slowly killing our coral reefs as well as the diverse ecosystems that they support.

For the last 20 years, other leaders of small island nations and I have tried to warn the world about the threat posed by climate change. Yet today, emissions, temperatures and sea levels continue to rise at ever faster rates. Soon we will pass a point of no return, and yet this colonial-style "rush for the ecosphere" shows no sign of abating. World leaders - especially leaders of the rich industrialized nations - appear content to allow countries like the Maldives to disappear beneath the waves, while they continue to make a deeply unethical trade-off between human lives and rights on one hand, and economic growth.

I hope that Oxfam International's new report will help to move the world from this tragic status quo to quick action in order to achieve a better future based upon international and intergenerational solidarity and climate justice.

Source: www.iht.com

Maldives president seeks help for 'paradise drowning'

Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom made an impassioned plea Tuesday for a cut in global greenhouse gas emissions, warning that rising sea levels could submerge his paradise island chain.

He launched a book at the UN-backed Business for the Environment conference to highlight the threat to his South Asian tropical island chain favoured by tourists for its white sandy beaches, clear waters and swaying palm trees.

"My people are blessed with one of the most beautiful settings that nature has to offer... To many people across the world, our shores have indeed become an earthly paradise. This paradise, though, is endangered," he said.

"Each year, the seas that make up 99 percent of the Maldives are rising, and, slowly but surely, engulfing our 1,192 low-lying islands and posing serious risks to the lives and livelihoods of the people."

He said he chose the title "Paradise Drowning" for his book because "it evokes an image fraught with great danger" and "most clearly encapsulates the threat of climate change and sea-level rise to my people."

Speaking to reporters later, Gayoom said the country can only adapt to the problem by relocating citizens to safer islands. Building protective walls on 193 inhabited islands would cost about six billion US dollars, which the government finds too expensive, he said.

Gayoom said the real culprit for rising sea levels is global warming and the solution lies in countries cutting the carbon dioxide emissions which have been blamed for the phenomenon.

He said it was ironic that although the Maldives accounts for only 0.01 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the country could be "possibly the biggest victim of global warming."

At the rate at which sea levels are rising, the islands would be rendered "uninhabitable in the not-too-distant future," he said.

Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said the problem outlined by Gayoom mirrors the fate of other low-lying territories worldwide.

"The challenge they are facing is one of continued existence," Steiner told AFP on the sidelines of the conference.

"In the Maldives, it is possibly losing many of its islands and even one day... losing a whole nation," Steiner said, adding that many other coastal areas are in the same predicament.

"Many of the Asian coastal zones, Africa's coastal zones, are highly vulnerable to sea-level rise," he warned.

Steiner also criticised those who argue the threat is being exaggerated.

"If you want to know what the consequences are, take a look at what the tsunami did in a few seconds and you get an idea of what destruction will arise from sea-level rise," he said, referring to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The tsunami killed 220,000 people in countries around the region and damaged 10 percent of the Maldives' inhabited islands.

But Gayoom said there was still hope as governments are negotiating a global treaty that will succeed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change aimed at committing countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"Ultimately, what it (the book) signals is hope -- hope that humankind will find consensus and a clear will to act. I am confident that we, the peoples of the world, will not allow this paradise to drown," he said.

More than 500 business executives, government officials, environmentalists and others from 30 countries have gathered for the two-day conference.

It is organised by the United Nations Environment Programme and the UN's Global Compact, an initiative which brings companies together with UN and other agencies to support environmental and social principles.

Source: http://afp.google.com/article

Maldives: “Paradise Drowning”, partly due to tourism?

The Maldives has a dilemma — it fears that rising seas caused by global warming could wipe the country off the map but it doesn’t want to restrict tourists who visit the Indian Ocean coral islands in aircraft whose emissions are a cause of climate change.

Read Melanie Lee and Neil Chatterjee’s story about the problem faced by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who is writing a book about ”Paradise Drowning” but wants to keep the tourist-dependent economy going.

What should countries like the Maldives do?

Ending poverty is the overriding goal for developing nations, but how far should they take part in fighting global warming, caused by people in rich nations on the other side of the world?

Would high green taxes on visitors help? Or would that be just a symbolic pinprick in the problem of global warming that could drive holidaymakers to pick another tropical destination?

What do you think?

Source: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/

U.N. human rights body turns to climate change

Climate change could erode the human rights of people living in small island states, coastal areas and parts of the world subjected to drought and floods, the U.N. Human Rights Council said on Friday.

In its first consideration of the issue, the United Nations forum's 47 member states endorsed by consensus a resolution stressing that global warming could threaten the livelihoods and welfare of many of the world's most vulnerable people.

They backed the proposal from the Maldives, Comoros, Tuvalu, Micronesia and other countries for "a detained analytical study of the relationship between climate change and human rights," to be conducted by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

"Until now, the global discourse on climate change has tended to focus on the physical or natural impacts of climate change," Abdul Ghafoor Mohamed, the Maldives' ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, told the session.

"The immediate and far-reaching impact of the phenomenon on human beings around the world has been largely neglected," he said. "It is time to redress this imbalance by highlighting the human face of climate change."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made the fight against climate change one of his top priorities, and encouraged all United Nations agencies to incorporate it into their work.

International experts have warned that the expected impacts of climate change -- including rising sea levels and intense storms, droughts and floods -- could strip millions of people from access to housing, food and clean water.

But diplomats at the United Nations have not yet sought to enshrine the right to protection from the effects of climate change in an international treaty, as has been done for other social and economic rights.

Louise Arbour, a former Canadian Supreme Court justice, has announced she will not seek another term as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights when her tenure ends on June 30. Her successor has not yet been named. (Reporting by Laura MacInnis)

Source: Reuters

Global warming threatens more than just coral

Rising sea levels from global warming will threaten the livelihoods and homes of more than 200,000 people who live on coral atolls in coming generations, the PACNEWS reported on Monday.

The warning came from Australia's University of Queensland archaeologist and expert on the prehistoric use of coral atolls, Marshall Weisler.

Weisler said the Central Pacific islands of Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands as well as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are most at risk.

Weisler said the situation was more serious than people realized with agricultural and already being lost to rising seas in the Marshall Islands, the PACNEWS, a Suva-based regional news agency reported on Monday.

"People have shown me where there used to be gardens, are now lagoons. There are coconut trees that are 20 meters off shore, half falling over," Weisler said.

"In Kiribati, there are high tides that inundate portions of villages, so people are on dry land in the morning and on stilt house villages with water under their house during high lunar tides.

"There are very serious problems for the next generation which may not even be able to live on the island that they are living on now," he added.

The International Panel on Climate Change has predicted sea levels could rise between nine and 88 centimeters this century.

Atolls are at risk because they are small, coral islands barely meters above current sea levels.

Weisler said predicting sea level rises was complex as waters could rise by different levels and have different effects, depending on the atoll location.

He said island nations would face tough decisions in the future about land ownership, economic futures and relocating entire countries within other nations.

"The people on these islands have a small voice because they are not Western industrialized countries with high populations. People aren't paying attention to them," Weisler said.

Source: news.xinhuanet.com