The Maldives and Sea-Level Rise

The name Mohamed Nasheed may ring a bell.  He’s a former president of the Maldives, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, who survived an assassination attempt earlier this year.

If his name is, in fact, familiar, it’s probably because he engineered the most awe-inspiring PR stunt in the history of climate change, convening a Cabinet meeting in scuba gear, under water. The point, obviously, is that without aggressive climate change adaptation, his country will soon cease to exist, as sea levels continue to rise due to warming ocean waters and the melting of ice in Greenland and the Antarctic.

In all candor, the outlook appears bleak.  One meter of shoreline in the Maldives protected by a water-breaker costs $3,000. An embankment costs another $4,000 a meter. That’s $7,000 to protect a meter of shoreline, and there are hundreds of islands.

Manhattan has built this precise type of protection with water breakers, but the median resale price for Manhattan apartments is $999,000 this month, the highest on record, and the value of the island is estimated at $1.8 trillion. Manhattan’s GDP is $635.3 billion, is 113 times that of the Maldives ($5.6 billion).

Photo above: “Maldivian girl with aquablue eyes”