The Maldives are sinking in the Indian Ocean - now what?
Whether or not its 800 km of beaches can survive climate change, the tropical country will never be the same.
"My quietest moments are in the water," says Thoiba Saeedh, an anthropologist, just before a speedboat takes us across the crystal-clear Indian Ocean to the tiny island of Felidhoo in the Maldives. The boat traces a wake between palm-covered, sand-fringed islands - some of them with holiday villas lined with wooden jetties - while a pod of dolphins flits through the gentle surf, and flying fish leap into the air.
2500 years of maritime life have shaped the culture and identity of the people of the Maldives, a country of 1196 low-lying islands arranged in a double chain of 26 coral atolls, so flat they barely break the horizon.
Foreigners know the islands for two things: beach holidays and the possibility of the Maldives becoming the first country on Earth to disappear because of rising sea levels. That includes Felidhoo, where Saeedh wanted to show me a culture and way of life that is already disappearing.
Now, as the pace of climate change accelerates, the tiny nation is trying to buy time, hoping that world leaders will cut carbon emissions before the Maldives' inevitable demise. The archipelago has staked its future (along with a significant sum from the public purse) on the construction of a raised artificial island that could house the majority of the population of nearly 555 000 people. Meanwhile, a Dutch design firm plans to build 5000 floating homes on pontoons anchored in a lagoon off the capital.
These measures may seem extreme, but these are extreme times for the Maldives. As President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih told world leaders at last autumn's UN climate conference in Scotland (COP26): "The difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees (Celsius) is a death sentence for the Maldives". And this was only the most recent call for help: a decade ago, Solih's predecessor in office, Mohammed Nasheed, made an unusual decision: he called a cabinet meeting (underwater and in scuba gear) and proposed moving the entire population to Australia for safety.
The shift from island life in places like Felidhoo to a skyscraper-laden artificial platform dubbed the City of Hope also carries a warning worth heeding, as climate change wreaks increasing havoc on every continent: we may lose who we are even before we lose where we are. And if the Maldives manages to survive the changing planet, an obvious question arises: what will be saved and what will be lost?
This neighbourhood of 16 skyscrapers, called Hulhumalé Phase II, is built on an artificial island created from sand pumped from the seabed. Maldivian residents are gradually being relocated to the skyscrapers to escape the rising sea. Photograph by Marco Zorzanell.
Left:
Hahmad is in his 30s and is from the island of Maafushi. He used to work in the fishing industry, which is in decline. Fishermen have to go deeper into the ocean to find fish because of overfishing for many decades.
Right:
A snapshot of traffic on the main road through the city of Male, the capital and most populous city of the Maldives. The densely populated city contrasts with the more than 1,100 small coral islands that make up the country. Photo by Marco Zorzanello
The atolls were formed from prehistoric volcanoes.
A million years before the dinosaurs disappeared, the Indian tectonic plate shifted northwards, opening a rift in the earth's crust from which a ridge of volcanic peaks grew. Over time, the peaks eroded to form the coral-covered atolls of the Maldives.
The total area of the country is only 297 square kilometres in some 90 000 square kilometres of ocean, with few islands larger than one square kilometre. Precision and differentiation when talking about land and sea is important. "When I say land, I include water," says Saeedh. "For us, water is not separate from land; the 'land' is the water and the island as a whole, because that's where we live. In other words, when the ocean makes up more than 99 per cent of your country, you better love it.
The islands themselves have an ephemeral quality: sandbanks on top of living coral, they grow and shrink, rise and fall, depending on ocean currents and sand deposits. The list of "missing islands" in the Maldives is long.
Most of the islands (including the capital, Malé) are 1.5 metres above sea level; climate scientists predict they will be flooded by the end of the century. Hulhumalé, the man-made rescue platform, has an elevation of 1.9 metres.
The development was engineered in 1997 by Herculean dredging of millions of tons of sand that were used as fill to turn two adjacent shallow lagoons into 428 hectares of compacted sand. On these islands, this kind of construction is considered new land.
"Two-thirds of the population can be accommodated on these two main islands," says Ismail Shan Rasheed, planning strategist for the Hulhumalé Development Corporation.
In many ways, Hulhumalé is an urban fantasy, like the beginning of the urban development video game SimCity. Parks and flats, mosques and shops, skating rinks and pavements, schools and roads have been built in what looks like a well-ordered coastal city that was connected to Malé in 2018 by a kilometre-long bridge.
The Sinamalé Bridge, opened in 2018, links the islands of Malé, Hulhulé and Hulhumalé. The bridge, nearly one kilometre long, was originally named the China-Maldives Friendship Bridge due to the Chinese government's funding of its construction. It is the first inter-island bridge in the Maldives. Photo by Marco Zorzanello
Maafushi Island is the local dumping ground. People deposit their waste directly on this site, where it is burned. Waste management is one of the main challenges in the Maldives. Photo by Marco Zorzanello
Rasheed himself moved to Hulhumalé in 2013 from a cramped flat in Malé where his children had no outdoor space to play and where his youngest daughter's asthma was aggravated by exhaust fumes. She sought the public parks, green spaces and fresh air of the planned city, Rasheed explained, pointing to a scale model of the new development in which matchbox-sized buildings line wide boulevards. "From the moment we moved into Hulhumalé, everything looked good to him," he recalled.
But there is still a long way to go: the first phase already looks like a well-ordered seaside town; the second is still a work in progress. Last September, Aishah Moosa moved into the newer part of Hulhumalé, where a cluster of 16 24-storey tower blocks is surrounded by gravel dunes, half-built car parks and piles of rubbish.
Several islands live in each tower. Moosa moved from a one-bedroom flat in Malé, which he shared with his sister and two nephews, to a three-bedroom flat on the top floor of "H-2". "There are a lot of people living here," she says. "We don't know our neighbours.
It's better here, but not much better. "We live in these towers because we have no other choice," says Moosa, "We would love to live on the islands, but there is no education or hospitals. Their new home is no substitute for island communities. But their tiny, marigold-coloured balcony offers what was previously unthinkable: high altitude in a country that has almost none. "We're not used to living at this altitude," she says, peering nervously over the balcony railing.
Shallow reef systems that are no longer viable living coral reefs are exploited for tourists to swim in the ocean near the beach. Photo by Marco Zorzanello.
Left:
Inga Dehnert, a marine biologist at the University of Milan Bicocca in Italy, works in a coral nursery, where corals are bred. The project aims to improve the health of corals, which are generally under pressure as the oceans warm.
Right:
The coral reefs of the Maldives have been decimated by warming waters, sand dredging and blasting during construction. The islands are littered with dead coral. Underwater life is a pale blue, with not many species to be seen. Photograph by Marco Zorzanello
Harmony with nature, endangered
Interestingly, for a country that is sinking, rising sea levels are a remarkably unusual feature of daily conversations between neighbours. Maldivians leave that to politicians or activists. As the Maldives is a Muslim country, many say the future is in the hands of Allah. The ocean has also been considered a threat, long before the seas began to rise; the 2004 tsunami, for example, killed a hundred people.
And, contrary to the barefoot Robinson Crusoe image peddled by the Maldives' tourism industry, the permanent population faces the same urban problems that afflict larger landlocked nations. Tourism and the money it brought with it fuelled the rapid development of exclusive resorts and the explosive growth of Malé. The city sits on less than 2.5 square kilometres of land but is home to 193,000 people, making it one of the most densely populated cities in the world.
And the dream is that the City of Hope can solve some of the nation's other ills by providing better schools and good jobs in a country where unemployment has reached 15%.
"We've developed like a boom!" says Fayyaz Ibrahim, a 50-something dive shop owner who still remembers the quiet streets with few cars when his family moved to the city in 1974 in search of better jobs, schools and basic services. As tourism took off, the modern world crept in at a dizzying pace. Centuries of urban development followed in decades.
Today, Malé's narrow streets are a back-and-forth of criss-crossing motorbikes, its ever taller buildings are lined with air-conditioning plugs and scaffolding, and its concrete stretches to the water's edge. Warehouse-sized diesel generators maintain electricity; industrially desalinated water pours from taps; rubbish is loaded onto barges and dumped on a nearby island; concrete tetrapods, like giant sea stones, are piled along the breakwater to keep the sea at bay. Malé, like the coral on which it sits, is under continuous construction.
Hussain Manik, 51, prays at Malé's old Friday mosque, as well as others. "I try to visit all the mosques, as each one is equally important," he says. The Old Friday Mosque is one of the oldest and most ornate mosques in the city. It and other local mosques are built of sturdy coral rocks. Photo by Marco Zorzanello
The Old Friday Mosque is one of the oldest and most ornate mosques in Malé. Here, a close-up of the Qur'anic writing on the mosque's coral blocks. Photograph by Marco Zorzanello
On remote Felidhoo, island life is ephemeral
The 88-kilometre drive south from Malé to Felidhoo passes between some of the Maldives' 130 "tourist islands" (privately run and reserved for tourists, where bikinis and alcohol are accepted), other "inhabited islands" where Maldivians live and work, and specks of "uninhabited islands".
The inhabited islands, says writer, poet, documentary filmmaker and architect Mariyam Isha Azeez, are where the Maldivian identity lies. "Neither the Maldives nor this city are the resorts," she said. "They are the islands."
Migration between islands has long been commonplace, in search of opportunities, better fishing, trade, a new home. Islands are abandoned when they become uninhabitable, and new ones are found. "Sailing from one island to another is a way of life for Maldivians, and has been for many centuries," wrote historian Naseema Mohamed, describing a seafaring lifestyle "in harmony with the ocean".
Abdul Shakoor Ibrahim, 72, who was born on the island and worked as a civil servant in Malé, came back in retirement to fulfil his dream of returning home.
Felidhoo is also experiencing changes, both natural and man-made. Rising seas play their part, but Ibrahim also blames the construction of the island's harbour, which placed a solid, immovable barrier in the sea to block the natural flow of currents and, in the process, sand, which accumulates where it shouldn't be.
These changes worry Saeedh, the anthropologist who brought me to this island. While balancing on a traditional hanging chair, made of wood and coconut shell fibres, she talks about all the upheavals her country is facing (rising seas, the pace of migration, climate change, urbanisation), and she does so with candour and a clear vision of the risks ahead. But he also insists on his fellow citizens' innate understanding of the transience of the place where they live.
"They must understand our relationship with the ocean. We coexist with the ocean and its creatures, its dangers and its anxieties," he says, explaining how Maldivians are able to live with the threat of erasure. "The idea that an island will last forever is against nature.
SOURCE: https://www.nationalgeographic.es/medio-ambiente/que-es-el-aumento-del-nivel-del-mar