Wanted: a large piece of property, preferably tropical and empty, with room for 300,000 inhabitants.
Mohamed Nasheed, who took office this week as the newly elected president of the Maldives, announced that he will establish an investment fund with some of the country’s tourism revenues to buy a new home for his citizens should global warming raise sea levels and submerge their picturesque but low-lying homeland.
“We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere,” he told a British newspaper this week. “It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome.”
The Indian Ocean country of 1,200 sandy islands about 500 miles from the tip of India rises just 8 feet above sea level at its highest point. Nasheed said even a minor rise in sea level will flood parts of the country and turn residents of the 250 inhabited islands into environmental refugees.
He plans to set aside some of the country’s $1 billion annual tourist revenues to acquire what could be described as a contingency country.
Nasheed has approached several countries — including Sri Lanka, India and Australia — about buying land, and said they have been receptive to the idea.
“We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades,” he said.
Hadi Dowlatabadi, a climate-change expert who holds a Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, agreed that it is likely the Maldives will one day disappear.
“It depends on how Greenland melts, but easily within a century,” he said.
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