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As Seas Rise, Maldives Seek To Buy a New Homeland
Peace Corps Online writes "The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue to buy a new homeland as insurance against climate change. Rising sea levels threaten to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees as the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels. The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59 cm by the year 2100. Most parts of the Maldives are just 150 cm above water so even a 'small rise' in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago. '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,' says the Muslim country's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, adding that he has already broached the subject with a number of countries and found them to be 'receptive.' India and Sri Lanka are targets because they have similar cultures and climates; Australia is worth looking at because of the immense amount of unoccupied land in that country. 'We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.'"
They have nothing to worry about, Global Warming is just a myth!
...Right?
If the summary is correct, and they are only 150 centimeters above water... than this isn't a very good place to build regardless of global warming or not. Your average over-sized wave could swamp the entire island.
Correct me if I am wrong here, but isn't most of that "unoccupied territory," "unoccupied" because it's a very harsh environment, basically desert, that isn't really suitable for settling?
Yes, but Australia, the country, is entirely contiguous with the continent. I can't imagine us (now or in the future) being very receptive to the idea of another country buying their way onto the continent and having to set up borders etc.
Besides, who'd want to move from a tropical archipelago to - let's face it - a desert? Sri Lanka is a much more likely candidate.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Nasheed's quote at the end of the summary really made me recall Bangladesh, where my parents are from. It's another country that is under major threat from climate change. I've often wondered what Bangladeshi people would do when the flood waters finally get bad enough to make the country uninhabitable, through no fault of their own (most of the people there are remarkably poor). I once read a touching BBC article where a village farmer complained that he was losing his country so Westerners could drive in their cars.
I always thought most Bangladeshis not killed by cataclysmic flooding would escape into neighboring countries, especially West Bengal in India, but the Maldives seems to have a "good" (at least practical) idea. Sadly the Bangladeshi government is too inefficient, corrupt, and schizophrenic to manage something as well thought out, costly, and long term as that.
I fully expect to have to explain to my kids that Bangladesh was where their grandparents were from but that it no long exists (above the ocean, anyway).
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
As tourism takes a hit from the economic crisis, this is a great piece of advertising. "Visit the beautiful Maldives while you still can!"
I just emailed my senator yesterday because I was concerned about the mention that environmental refugees (which there have already been several groups) are not recognized by the international community, and was hoping to at least get the idea mentioned before the senate.
I hope he reads it, or a staffer does - seeing as he just got a promotion and might be a little busy.
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meh
I'd try to post some offbeat humorous comment, but I don't see a damn thing funny about this.
I helped a photographer assemble footage for a piece he's doing about this. He's gone there and stayed with Mohamed Nasheed for a few years running. The place is small enough that everyone more or less knows everyone. From what I saw they are incredibly pragmatic and dignified about this. They don't want a handout but would like to bring the world's attention to it. There are dozens of similar smaller nations that will not have the luxury of money to perchance buy their way out of this. I suspect, when this reaches critical mass, money won't be much of factor anyway. I hope the entire world will be able to be as calm and dignified and take a cue from the way they're currently dealing with it.
"Australia is worth looking at because of the immense amount of unoccupied land in that country. "
There are very good reasons why we have an immense amount of unoccupied land in Australia...
Picture Fallout 3, minus the radiation and ruins. And water. And trees. And people. Feel free to leave in the giant bugs and mutants though...
Contrary to popular oppinion, London is not burning. It is, in fact, quite nippy.
I know a guy who visits maldives often (mainly to go scuba diving). Their language is very similar to singalese (lang spoken in srilanka) and their food is a combination of Srilankan and Kerala (a state in India) food. I would tend to think they would look at buying land at these places rather than Australia
Is 7 meters(ca. 21 feet) below sealevel and we are not leaving. Running is a bad solution. Fight the water because it will fight you. Feet getting wet? Build dams and dykes and stay safe. That idea is probably 10 times cheaper and more efficient than the whole "move everyboy out and buy a new homeland plan".
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Or how about buying a shitload of dirt?
Just for the convenience of keeping borders "manageable", I doubt any place they occupy can be elsewhere but on a seashore. Who'd want to lock themselves in a country, only to have them embargo you over a trade dispute? I mean, being land-locked is bad enough, but being bad locked inside a country that's bigger than you, whose standing army outnumbers you and who doesn't like you anymore?
On the other hand, maybe New Zealand will offer a better deal.
Hey, I live in Florida, you insensitive clod!
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Perhaps because the Maldives is a chain of over 1,000 low atolls rather than a contiguous land mass with a continent on one side of it?
Not only will he lower sea levels in the long run, ;)
but in the short term, he can teach them to walk on water.
A simple answer: between 1993 and 2000, the mean rate was 3.1mm/year, and it is increasing. These islands are like, 150 centimeters above sea level. Not much margin there.
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It's actually.....Republic of Maldives.
http://www.presidencymaldives.gov.mv/pages/index.php
http://www.maldivesinfo.gov.mv/home/index.php
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Your question is simple, but the answer is not. Sea levels have risen 120 meters during this interglacial warming period. Should the Greenland ice cap melt again, then they may rise up to another 7 meters. That is the maximum. The fact that these islands exist above current sea levels is proof that the sea levels have been higher than they are now. These islands are basically relic coral reefs and hence formed under water.
Cheers
JE
If Denmark was a series of extremely tiny islands, you'd have a point. But it's not, so you don't.
The problem is that Australia doesn't recycle water. The reason they don't is because they have a peculiar habit of asking the population to vote on things and people are very hard to convince of this sort of thing.
Here in the UK we've survived for generations on recycled water but Queenslanders would rather go parched than drink 'shit'.
Seeing as how their country is being turned into a desert. I'm not sure which is worse, personally. Having your homeland washed out to sea, or being told that you have to make do with land that would require probably tens of billions of dollars (that you don't have, and probably will never have) to start turning into semi-usable living space.
Perhaps we could get to work on developing some kind of 'stillsuit' technology?
They could become the planet's first all ocean living nation, and start really developing that sort of tech (especially how to deal with more extreme ocean events...). Just start buying up old ships and refurb them to be floating houses, businesses, even little mini farms. Just a wild thought. I know if I lived there, I'd be trying to cob together a little floating miniark instead of building the traditional ..whatever they got, hovel/shack. Just a house that could float if flood water rise, a big raft, oil drums and logs, whatever. I mean this exists already as expensive houseboats, that mostly just sit tethered to a marina slip, but no reason they need to be so elaborate and expensive, just float and not leak that bad. With that said, carrying the concept further, there are a lot of boats and ships scrapped all the time that perhaps could be recycled, even if it was just into being barges.
Another option is massive terraforming, take what is the swampiest land they have, dig out thousands of miles of canals, use the dredged out soil to build up what good and higher elevation parts of the land they want to save, and just skip land roads for the most part, use the canals for transportation. They could start small, literally with what manpower and equipment exists (example: china terracing entire mountains for farming using shovels and baskets mostly), just small ditch canals wide enough to pass two canoes next to each other, then gradually work that out bigger until it can handle normal decent boats, then onto real ships and barges of whatever size work out to be practical. Of course, that means salt water everywhere, but seeing as how this will happen anyway if the oceans really rise....might be an option short of trying to find some donor space for what, 150 million people someplace else? 150 thousand can go be refugees, 150 million might start to run into complications even more daunting than a nationwide land reclamation/canal/lotta boats project. I don't know much about that nation at all, I would guess being so low they already have a lot of existing water based transportation and access. Just move heavy that way more.
Wouldn't constructing floodbanks (dikes) be a must cheaper option? Here in Amsterdam we live 1.5 meter below sea level but I have no reason to worry...
The issue is really with the unique geography of the Maldives. The country is actually a chain of 1,000+ tiny islands - some of them barely large enough to actually be called an island. You'd have to import all the raw materials for those dikes, and you'd wind up with more wall than land in many places.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
The world was not several degrees warmer then. Stop spreading that uneducated meme.
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Doing this would probably make the Maldives sink even quicker, because it would kill the coral, which is what actually keeps the islands out of the water... Before trying to solve a environmental issue you have to make sure that it won't engender a worse problem...
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
Why bother moving? I say rent a party barge or tanker (like in waterworld?) and anchor it to the island... Sea goes up, keep your country on the barge/tanker... Sea goes down, sell the land to the people on the boat! Sounds Win/Win to me.
That is assuming you'll survive the aliens that would escape from the frozen city beneath the ice of antartica, but Hey, who am I to split hairs.
Apparently residents from Manhattan will be watching closely and anxiously taking notes on how this gets resolved.
There was a group of dreamers a while back with an idea they called the Millennium Project. One of their ideas for solving the population crunch was creating artificial islands to populate the empty reaches of the equatorial waters. I don't remember all of the details of their plan, it's been years, but the islands themselves would be created by pulling calcium out of sea water, I think using some form of electrolysis. You lay metal grids in the water, run a current, and the calcium grows on the grid like sugar on a string with rock candy.
The islands themselves would be like giant dinner plates floating on the water, but I assume with enclosed flotation chambers so a good sloshing wouldn't sink them as it does with the dinner plate. The goal here would be extremely green and low-impact living so the islands would generate their own power via green and renewable methods, crops would be grown on the upper surface, and waste would be recycled. The experience here would be less like a cruise ship and more like low-impact commune living.
The habitat itself would have a submerged lip around the edge that would be perfect for the formation of corals and home for shallow water fish. Even if the island were moored in deep water, it would be a a fine habitat, much like a volcanic island can rise from the abyssal plane and suddenly there's a nice shallow water habitat for fish.
The really cool part is that these islands could theoretically be free-floating, drifting with the currents and floating around the world, using powered propulsion only when pushed too close to obstructions.
These islands represent a fairly interesting idea in population management. Right now, we have too damn many people on the planet. Now I know we're not going to get people to reduce population the way we're living now, there'd be blood in the streets if anyone forced them to. And not doing anything will just lead to ecological collapse, mass starvation, wars, and the population will be whittled down through attrition. But if we could get people a safe, clean, sustainable standard of living away from the cycle of poverty, the west has already shown that birthrates will naturally stabilize and begin to decline. The problem manages itself without coercion.
I don't know how likely it would be but I think it would be extremely cool if the islanders could just build their own replacements and say "fuck global warming, we're ready for it." Maybe the Dutch can join them, not sure how much longer their dikes can hold out.
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That calculator is doing it wrong, and the web page was clearly written by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
I love how that Wikipedia entry states, with absolutely certainty that the rising sea level is mainly a result of man-made global warming.
What I find interesting is that there is strong archeological evidence of populations thrived when the climate was warmer and the seas higher. One example being prehistoric Japan, 4000 BC to 2000 BC, when the seas were believed 5 to 6 meters higher. The indigenous population declined significantly when temperatures dropped.
These people on the Maldives would be screwed whether or not anyone wants to blame global warming. I suppose I'm being insensitive, but maybe they should have thought twice when they decided to settle land that's pretty much at sea level sitting out in the middle of the Indian ocean.
Frankly, I'm tired of this alarmist crap. I completely believe that the climate is changing, but when hasn't it been changing? This notion that humans are responsible for screwing everything about is about as arrogant, in my mind, as the belief people once had that humanity was at the center of the universe.
Numbers from the USGS.
If East Antarctica melts, we're looking at a 64.8m rise in sea level.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Number's don't seem to add up...
3.1mm/yr, and the entire country is only 115 sq. miles, with a third of the population in the capital city, which sits on less than 1 square mile. Additionally, from a brief glance at the most populous towns/villages, it looks like another third of the population is residing on no more than 10 sq. miles.
Would it really be more cost effective to move the entire population to a new "homeland", instead of investing in efficiently condensing the population, and building a levee system around the current well-developed, and incredibly expensive-to-replace infrastructure?!!?
This smells like a "Poor us!" bid for attention and money, playing off of the "green guilt" of the rest of the developed world.
In other words...I'm calling shenanigans.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIbTJ6mhCqk
"Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1991). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 27 billion tonnes per year (30 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 2006) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2, through 2003.]. Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes--the equivalent of more than 8,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 3.3 million tonnes/year)! (Gerlach et. al., 2002)"
http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/hazards/gas/index.php
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
1) To get modded Insightful:
Say man is responsible for Global Warming
2) To get modded Flamebait, Troll, Offtopic:
Have a healthy skepticism of #1
Am a Maldivian and am surprised by the amount of coverage this is getting. The comment (by our president) was in the context of, IMO, "we need to save money - have a fund, for the worst case scenario". Sooooo not what is being made out of it. :)
How the hell did a religious rant get modded +4 insightful.
Let me guess... you dont live in India, do you? Let me inform you that its not just Muslims who have demanded a separate state, its simply leaders who want more power demand separate state and want oust every other person born out-of-the-state from the state.
You might want to google for Raj Thackeray. He is demanding that every person not born in Maharashtra should leave the state. And he has been quite successful at it too.
You might also want to look at Telugu Desam Party's claim for separate Telungana state.
The way I see it, its always the politicians making an issue out caste, race. It was Jinnah et all for pakistan.
Do you mind explaining me what the f--- did this all have to do with being a muslim?
A plague on both your houses - and on the people who modded up this partisan bullshit. 1. There has been plenty of Hindu on Muslim violence since independence, and 2. not all Muslims are terrorist, for fuck's sake.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Arrogant? Why? We have the ability to wipe most human life off the planet in about an hour using nuclear weapons. Why is it arrogance to think we could do it in 50 years by other means?
To some extent, it's pretty irrelevant whether humans are changing it or not. The true question is "What is the cost of the changing climate, and what is the cost of fixing it?" This of course begs the question of whether the change is manmade or not, but it's not the starting point.
No, the effect humans are having is ALL that matters when trying to figure out the cost of 'fixing' climate change. The cost of preventing climate change is 100% dependent on how much our activity can impact it. If our influence on climate change is enormous maybe we could change it enough by spending $10 per year, but if we have only a small influence on climate change, even trillions of dollars may not be enough to change climate to a meaningful extent.
We have a cost/benefit equation before us to choose between adapting to climate change, and trying to stop it, or some combination there of. The impact that we can have on climate change is of unquestionable importance to that decision and the alarmists seem to think that by setting the costs for adaptation at infinity they can ignore the question, they can't.
The greenhouse effect works. It's the basis of ... er ... greenhouses. Glass is an "odorless colorless" substance that's transparent to visible light but blocks infrared. Light enters the greenhouse, hits something inside, the innards warm up, the warm objects try to re-radiate the energy as infrared, and the glass stops that IR getting out again.
Similarly with CO2. Transparent to visible light, not so transparent to infrared.
Think of the difference between a dry winter night with and without cloud cover. The temperature tends to drop faster on the cloudless nights, yes? So greenhouse gases are like "one-way" cloud cover, they don't stop the sunlight coming in, but help keep the heat in once it's here.
So the greenhouse effect itself is real. The questions are:
(a) Is our climate currently changing in a significant way?
(b) How much of this is due to greenhouse effects?
(c) How much of the greenhouse contribution is due to human activity? And
(d) What are the cost-benefit implications of doing nothing versus doing something?
Eric Baird