Maldives, which lives in low-lying areas, seeks easier funding to fight waves May 27, 2024

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By AFP - Agence France Presse

Maldives, which lives in low-lying areas, seeks easier funding to fight waves

The Maldives on Saturday demanded international funding to combat rising sea levels, saying the low-lying Indian Ocean archipelago was being unfairly excluded from the most generous support measures.

“The Maldives is responsible for just 0.003% of global emissions, but it is one of the first countries to suffer the existential consequences of the climate crisis,” wrote President Mohamed Muizzu in Britain's Guardian newspaper.

“Wealthier nations have a moral responsibility to communities like ours.”

His comments were made ahead of the once-a-decade conference of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) - many of them known as luxury tourist destinations but threatened by rising sea levels - which he will co-chair in Antigua and Barbuda, which begins on Monday.

SIDS receives “only about 14% of the funding that least developed countries receive,” he said.

According to the IMF, the Maldives has a higher GDP per capita than Chile, Mexico, Malaysia, or China, but Muizzu called the gross domestic product a “legacy metric”.

“Thanks to the Maldives' healthy tourism sector, we are classified as an emerging economy and therefore miss out on the cheaper financing reserved for lower-income countries.”

Muizzu said that his country needs around US$500 million to mitigate the effects of climate change and that the tourism-dependent economy was unable to raise the money on its own.

The first SIDS meeting was held in 1994, five years after the then-president of the Maldives, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, warned that his nation of atolls with 1,192 small coral islets would face extinction if sea levels rose by one meter.

Gayoom has successfully begun land reclamation to build an artificial island two meters above sea level and twice the size of his congested two-square-kilometer capital, Male.

Muizzu, who was elected in September, unveiled plans for a larger artificial island with 30,000 apartments, “Ras Male”, to combat the rising waves.

But the project did not qualify for climate finance because it was classified as infrastructure work, he lamented.

Muizzu is seen as pro-Beijing and, according to government officials, much of the construction work is expected to be carried out by Chinese companies.

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