It’s a while since stories started to emerge about the possible evacuation to New Zealand of the population of Tuvalu, a Pacific small island state, as rising sea levels begin to make themselves felt.
But this week’s news that the Maldives is actively planning for the same scenario represents an upwards shift in gear. For one thing, we’re talking about a lot more people – over a quarter of a million, as opposed to 9,000 with Tuvalu.
Moreover, the shape of the plan looks rather different: rather than presenting themselves as environmental refugees, the Maldives’ new president intends to establish a sovereign wealth fund to use tourism revenues to purchase land in a third country – India and Sri Lanka are both mentioned in coverage – for the whole population.
The really big question, though, is the one posed by Scott Leckie of Displacement Solutions, a refugee consultancy:
We don’t know where they plan to buy this land or whether they have thought it through … are they actually asking to re-establish the Maldives elsewhere?
One to add to the rapidly growing list of new climate-driven sovereignty dilemmas for the 21st century, along with access rights to a newly melted Northwest Passage, ownership rights over newly available Arctic oil and the rest…
(For more on this and related issues, see the new issue of Forced Migration Review, which is a special edition on the issue of climate change and displacement.)
