The Maldive’s to be Relocated?

The Government of the Maldives, a small island nation in the Indian Ocean, is looking at alternative ways to deal with the nation’s impending inundation.

Global sea level rise is a big problem for many of the world’s nations. With an average height above sea level of 1.5m and a maximum height of 4m the Maldives has a bigger problem than most. In their 2007 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast that sea level rise is occurring and is speeding up. They also acknowledge that the amount of change varies from place to place. Some regions are seeing a rise, others a fall.

The governments of all small island nations under threat from these changes have been trying to come up with workable solutions. For example one solution under consideration by the Maldivian government involves building a protective sea wall around a several of islands and moving the entire population to a new protected home. This option has been dismissed however as it was thought to be prohibitively expensive.

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So the idea that is now being put forward is to buy up an area of land in either India or Sri Lanka and move the entire population in the event that the nation is flooded. The president has suggested that in order to fund this project a tourist tax be introduced. Hundreds of thousands of visitors a year travel to these low lying atolls and islands to take advantage of some of the best diving found anywhere in the world.

It is ironic then that an island nation relying on one of the most CO2 polluting industries - air travel - for the majority of its income will have to divert a large part of that income in the future to address the problems caused now.

Image credit: Peta_Peta at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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