For the Maldives,it's not just sink or swim

A global accord is needed to curtail green house gas emissions

 Whether his nation could survive the solution is unclear. The Maldives is an archipelago of 1,190 islands in the Indian Ocean, with an average elevation of four feet. Even a slight rise in global sea levels, which many scientists predict will occur by the end of this century, could submerge most of the Maldives.
Last November, when Nasheed proposed moving all 3,00,000 Maldivians to safer territory, he named India, Sri Lanka and Australia as possible destinations and described a plan that would use tourism revenues from the present to establish a sovereign wealth fund with which he could buy a new country, in the future.
At a recent meeting, Nasheed declared that it was time to act. “What we need to do is nothing short of decarbonising the entire global economy,” he said.
“If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy. I announce that the Maldives will become the first carbon-neutral country in the world,” he announced.
Twenty-two years ago, Nasheed’s predecessor travelled to New York with a mission. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, then only nine years into his 30-year reign, stood before the United Nations and warned the world that rising sea levels would eventually erase his country from the map.
“With a mere one-meter rise,” he said, “a storm surge would be catastrophic and possibly fatal to the nation.”
Endangered people
At the UN Earth Summit in Brazil five years later, Gayoom introduced himself as “a representative of an endangered people.” When Gayoom wasn’t abroad predicting that Maldivians could become the first environmental refugees, however, he was crushing dissenters back home.
His 30 years in office were punctuated by regular, uncontested elections that he won each time with at least 90 per cent of the vote. One of those he jailed, at least 13 times, was a spunky journalist named Mohamed Nasheed.
Nasheed was born in Malé, the son of a prosperous businessman. He studied abroad, first in Sri Lanka, then in Britain, before returning to the Maldives in the late 1980s and helping found a magazine called ‘Sangu’.
He wrote investigative reports implicating Gayoom’s regime in corruption and human rights abuses. After the fifth issue, the police raided the magazine’s office and arrested Nasheed. He was 23. He spent 18 months in solitary confinement.  In 1991, Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience.
Ten years later, after several more stints in jail, Nasheed won a seat in parliament. He stayed there a few months before being tried, once again, on trumped-up charges and incarcerated. After his release, Nasheed left for Sri Lanka to start the Maldivian Democratic Party.
Ultimately, Gayoom’s henchmen found him. Over a span of two days in 2005, Nasheed survived a suspicious car accident and then caught people casing his home in Colombo. He fled to Britain, where, he said, “you could always talk to a Western government about democracy,” and he received political asylum. In 2005, Nasheed gave that up and returned to the Maldives for good.
Late last year, Gayoom agreed to hold the Maldives’ first multi-party presidential elections. On polling day, Gayoom ranked as Asia’s longest-serving president. Nasheed, the perennial inmate, ran against him. By the second round of voting, Nasheed secured support from a handful of smaller opposition parties and won.

Proposal for mass exodus

After three decades of strongman rule, the Maldives, a Sunni Muslim country with, at least officially, no religious minorities, exemplified how a peaceful, democratic transition of power might look in other parts of the Muslim world. Then Nasheed proposed the mass exodus. And in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Al Gore encouraged US Congress to pass legislation reducing carbon emissions by citing Nasheed’s initiative as just one example of what could happen if they failed to act.
In 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that by 2100, sea levels could rise by anywhere between seven and 23 inches.
The IPCC represents the closest thing the scientific community has to a consensus, but nearly every scientist I spoke with placed his or her estimates slightly higher.
Says Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Potsdam, “This is a real long-term effect that we are setting into motion.” Rahmstorf says he believes the increase could be as great as 1.4 meters, or four and a half feet, by 2100.
In December, the United States will participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Expectations are high that the conference may produce a global accord to supersede the Kyoto Protocol and curtail greenhouse-gas emissions.
The plight of the Maldives poses an eschatological question as much as an environmental one. When will the world end? How can we prepare for it? In that respect, we are all Maldivians. The islanders just happen to be among the first groups to contemplate these questions seriously.