Environment

‘A displaced people with no international legal protection’ – the future for Maldives?

President Mohamed Nasheed

For centuries the Maldives islands have had to contend with the mayhem that nature can inflict –from monsoon gales to the desolation of the 2004 Asian tsunami. Dotted across a 90,000 sq km stretch of the Indian Ocean, they have always stood their ground. Yet today the islands face possibly their gravest threat.

‘The impacts of climate change can already be felt’, says Mr Nasheed, a softly-spoken former journalist who came to power in October 2008 following an election monitored by Commonwealth Observers.

‘One-third of our inhabited islands are suffering from coastal erosion in part attributed to climate change. This erosion threatens people’s property and saltwater intrusion contaminates drinking water and degrades farmland’.

But worse is set to come, says the 42-year-old leader. ‘If atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are not quickly reduced and temperatures brought under control’, he explains, ‘rising seas could submerge my country’.

A front-line state
Climate change, he says, is not just a problem for low lying countries such as Maldives, which at its highest point is just 2.3 metres above sea level. The phenomenon, he claims, ‘is the 21st century’s greatest human rights and security issue’.

‘Future generations of Maldivians face a potentially bleak future – a displaced people with no international legal protection’, he says. ‘But it won’t just be Maldivians who suffer. Climate change threatens to submerge the homes of tens of millions of Bangladeshis and could devastate large
swathes of Africa this century’.

In March 2009, Mr Nasheed helped secure the adoption of a landmark United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on human rights and climate change. Resolution 10/4 recognises that global warming fundamentally undermines the lives and rights of millions of vulnerable people.

Drafted at the United Nations, the declaration was a major milestone in gaining international recognition for human and legal rights amid climate change. But Mr Nasheed believes that the Commonwealth, too, can play an important role in the fight against climate change, helping small nations such as his be heard at vital negotiations.

‘The Commonwealth can help ensure that the voices of the most vulnerable people are not drowned out in the global climate change debate’, says Mr Nasheed.

‘What happens to the Maldives today happens to the rest of the world tomorrow.’

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