"Maldives considers buying dry land if seas rise"

From The International Herald Tribune
By Andrew C. Revkin

Published: November 11, 2008

The president-elect of the Maldives, a nation of 1,200 low islands in the Indian Ocean, is planning to establish an investment fund with some of its earnings from tourism so it can buy a haven for its citizens should global warming raise sea levels at a dangerous pace, according to several news reports.

Mohamed Nasheed, a former political prisoner who will be sworn in Tuesday as the country's first democratically elected president, named Sri Lanka and India as possible spots for a refuge, according to the BBC.

Nasheed's spokesman, Ibrahim Hussein Zaki, said that the new government had to take action. "Global warming and environmental issues are issues of major concern to the Maldivian people," he said on the BBC's "World Today" program. "We are just about three feet above sea level. So any sea level rise could have a devastating effect on the people of the Maldives and their very survival."

The Maldives, south of India, is known as a tourist destination and has received much news coverage as a place that is likely to be overwhelmed by the effects of climate change.
In its latest report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations projected that sea levels worldwide could rise up to two feet by 2100 as ice sheets eroded and warming seawater expanded. And the panel and independent climate specialists said centuries of rising seas could follow if warming persisted.

The country was one of the founding members of the Alliance of Small Island States, which since 1992 has pressed the world's industrialized countries to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to rising temperatures.

The Maldives is particularly vulnerable to flooding because its population has surged to nearly 400,000 from 200,000 in 20 years. Malé, the crowded one-square-mile capital, is ringed by sea walls, built with assistance from Japan.

Many of the islands were submerged as the waves of the 2004 Asian tsunami surged by.