The Maldives is the extreme test case for climate change action

Like the azure ocean waters, the challenge of global warming is clear in the archipelago. But can the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new report crystallise action?
Under threat: Baa Atoll, Maldives.
Paradox in paradise: the Maldives economy runs on the natural beauty that development, climate change and other environmental problems threaten. Photograph: Sakis Papadopoulos

Like rays of burning sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass, almost all the world's environmental problems come into sharp focus in the Maldives. The 1,000km-long archipelago is the extreme test case.

The lowest lying country in the world is not even built on sand, but on the planet's most endangered ecosystem, coral reefs, the smashed fragments of which comprise every stunning white beach. And not only is the tide of sea level lapping at the shallow islands, but sea temperatures are rising as is the acidity of the ocean: both kill the corals.

The news from the world's climate scientists in their landmark report on Friday will be that the threat of global warming is worse and more imminent than in their 2007 analysis. But what is being done?


Solar power would be a just quarter of the cost on most islands, Mohamed Arjwad at the Maldives energy authority told me, making it a no-brainer - in theory. But there's no capital or expertise to deliver it, he says.


"That is too many if they are not implemented well, and they are not," says Armando Kraenzlin, regional vice-president for the Four Seasons resorts in the Maldives, which spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on marine scientists in an attempt to protect its own natural coral and sealife assets.


"The Chinese pay a hell of a lot of money for these: that is good for us and also bad for us," Dr Shiham Adam, head of the Marine Research Centre, tells me. The tension is summed up by anecdotes of the increasingly numerous and rich Chinese tourists who are attracted by the extraordinary sea life and then eat it.

Add to all these challenges the vast and growing rubbish mountains - the only hills in the Maldives, locals joke – and the growing freshwater crisis and it's clear the Maldives is on the environmental front line.



Mohamed Aslam, a former environment minister, accepts the short term nature of politics and the focus of voters in the current presidential campaign on housing, health and welfare benefits. "There is a mismatch in timescale. Climate change is decade-long or more but political timescales are four to five years," he says. "But you need to survive to enjoy those benefits. Just because you are not dead now doesn't mean you are not dying."



Mohamed Nasheed, whose advocacy as president put the Maldives on the climate change map, is uncertain. Asked for the odds of his grandchildren inheriting an inhabitable Maldives, he says: "50-50."