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UNIT 2: TOURISM, HOSPITALITY AND THE ENVIRONMENT – IMPACTS AND SOLUTIONS
Letter from the Maldives -
Not Sinking but Drowning
From THE ECONOMIST, 13 May 2000
How do you keep paradise afloat? The Maldivians urgently want to know. Their
ocean country is made up of more than a thousand coral islands strewn across the
turquoise waters of the equatorial Indian ocean. Buoyed by good weather, good
location and lots of tourism, the country’s 250,000 or so citizens lead comfortable
lives. Yet for how much longer, nobody knows. The sea around them is rising.
The problem of greenhouse gases may sound nebulous in Maidstone or Miami. But
to the people of the Maldives it is a clear and present danger. The noisy tea shops
of Male, the capital, are full of men (no women: this is an Islamic country) who can
tell you all about the early signs of impending disaster. Fishermen hawking their
catch at the market complain of the decline in live bait. Hotel owners lament that
the warming of the sea has bleached the life, and pretty colours, out of much of
the famous coral.
And in case anyone should gaze at the clear sky or sparkling water and wonder if
life wasn’t so bad after all, Abdul Gayoom, the president of the Maldives and Asia’s
longest-serving ruler, is never silent for long on the threat that global warming
poses to his fellow citizens and to the island’s tourism. He uses his grip on the
local press to keep the dangers close to the front of everyone’s mind. Nor do his
anxieties stop at his own country’s coral. He is world spokesman for low-lying
islanders everywhere.
Engineering is one answer, for the Maldives at least. To combat the surge in storms
and waves, the government has built what locals call the ‘Great Wall of Male’:
a concrete barrier 1.8-metre (6 ft) high that partly rings the capital. Set just off
shore, it was designed to absorb wave energy and spare Male further damage.
More ambitious is Hulhumale, an artificial island, higher than Male, that officials
say they are building nearby. Sceptics mock. But the plan is to house perhaps half
the country’s present population there, eventually.
Most of the Maldives’ coral is less than a metre above sea level. So a sea-level
rise of three-quarters of a metre this century, which many who study climate
think it reasonable to expect, would wipe the country out. Even a less fearsome
20-centimetre rise, combined with bigger waves, could wreak havoc.
William Allison, a scientist who lives in Male, explains it as follows. Global
warming threatens coral in several ways. Rising seas are not bad in themselves.
They give coral more upward growing room. But coral flourishes in water of around
22°C. A warmer atmosphere threatens to heat the local ocean to more than that,
killing the coral. Another danger is carbon dioxide. When too much of this gas
dissolves in seawater, corals build skeletons only with the greatest difficulty. A
final worry is that hotter temperatures will increase the scale and frequency of
storms.
It sounds grim. But Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University has a cheery, get-inyour-boat
solution. Not that he thinks low-lying islanders are exaggerating. Their
reefs and beaches could well be submerged, in his view. But burning less oil
to keep air cool so ice stays ice and the seas don’t warm is too expensive and
roundabout a way to meet the danger, Mr Mendelsohn thinks. Wouldn’t it be
cheaper, he asks, for Maldivians, and those like them, to move?
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