Hello and welcome to the details of Low-lying Maldives seeks easier funding to battle waves and now with the details
Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - Low-lying Maldives seeks easier funding to battle waves. — AFP pic
MALÉ, Maldives, May 25 — The Maldives today demanded international funding to battle rising sea levels, saying the low-lying Indian Ocean archipelago was being unfairly excluded from the most generous support measures.
“The Maldives is liable for just 0.003 percent of global emissions, but is one of the first countries to endure the existential consequences of the climate crisis,” President Mohamed Muizzu wrote in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
“Wealthier nations have a moral responsibility to communities like ours.”
His comments came ahead of a once-a-decade conference of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) — many of them known as luxury tourism destinations but threatened by rising sea levels — he will co-chair in Antigua and Barbuda, which opens Monday.
Advertisement
SIDS receive “only about 14 per cent of the finance that the 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 gross domestic product a “legacy metric”.
“Thanks to the Maldives’ healthy tourism industry, we are ranked as an emerging economy and therefore shut out from the cheaper financing set aside for the lowest income countries.”
Advertisement
Muizzu has said that his country needs about US$500 million (RM2.4 billion) to mitigate the effects of climate change and the tourism-dependent economy was unable to raise the money on its own.
The first SIDS meeting was in 1994, five years after Maldives’ then-president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom warned that his atoll nation of 1,192 tiny coral islets faced extinction if sea levels rose by a metre.
Gayoom successfully initiated a land reclamation to build an artificial island two metres above sea level and twice the size of his congested two-square-kilometre capital island Male.
Muizzu, who was elected in September, has unveiled plans for a bigger man-made island with 30,000 apartments, “Ras Male”, to battle rising waves.
But the project was not eligible for climate funding as it was classed 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 firms. — AFP
These were the details of the news Low-lying Maldives seeks easier funding to battle waves for this day. We hope that we have succeeded by giving you the full details and information. To follow all our news, you can subscribe to the alerts system or to one of our different systems to provide you with all that is new.
It is also worth noting that the original news has been published and is available at Malay Mail and the editorial team at AlKhaleej Today has confirmed it and it has been modified, and it may have been completely transferred or quoted from it and you can read and follow this news from its main source.
