World Environment Day 2024
Press Statement
5 June 2024
Global Climate Change Reality
Scientists tell us that humanity has now crossed the safety of 6 of 9 planetary boundaries.
The scope of environmental negligence nationally and internationally is absolute.
Climate inaction continues to undermine our security and survival because the requirement of business and economy is the destruction of our living environment to the point of systemic collapse.
The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has been using every warning possible to raise concerns about the global climate crisis. These continue to be falling on politically deaf ears.
In 2021, he declared Code Red for Humanity.
In 2023, he said the earth is no longer warm, but the era of Global Boiling has arrived.
None of these warnings have moved our national governments, including the Maldives, which is one of the world’s lowest lying small island states most vulnerable to global climate catastrophes. The Maldives is also at the forefront of claiming climate victimhood, while actively undermining its own resilience through deliberate acts of ecocide under the guise of “development”.
Globally, scientists despair at the utter failure of all decision-makers to act on the stark reality of climate change and the rapidly increasing list of climate disasters around the world.
Lives, homes, villages, towns, cities as well as the natural world and wildlife essential for human survival are being decimated or lost to extreme heat, wildfires and floods worldwide.
The latest reminder of the gravity of climate change is the death of the last glacier in Venezuela.
The impacts of melting glaciers due to ‘global boiling’ will dictate whether Maldives can stay above the tideline as sea-levels rise and ocean dynamics change.
The existential threat of the climate crisis to the Maldives is clear.
Maldives Climate Change Reality
The Maldives is the seventh largest, and the fifth most diverse reef area in the world.
The global scientific consensus is that our reefs are in grave danger due to global heating, ocean acidification and sea-level rise.
Ocean plastic and waste discharge issues are added threats to all life.
Right now, we are in the middle of a global mass coral bleaching event, which endangers our living reef ecosystems and marine biodiversity as never before. The ability of the Maldives to stay above the sea surface reduces with every impact or attack on the living ocean environment which constitutes the foundations of the country.
In this grim situation, the greatest threat to the Maldives is its own State sponsored actions.
Institutional Failure To Protect The Environment
As our reef ecosystems and marine wildlife struggle to survive, our institutions established to protect the environment continues to undermine that possibility by enabling and facilitating the destruction of ecological integrity and resilience in multiple ways. In December 2023, the government of Maldives announced yet another historically largest ever reclamation project heralding the total loss of one of the last remaining reef and lagoon ecosystems in South Male’ Atoll, the Fushidhiggaru lagoon. This decision dismisses and devalues the ecosystem services provided by this important natural asset, for tourism, fishery and local community livelihoods. Most importantly, it undermines climate resilience and biodiversity preservation in a natural atoll system that continues to be decimated by dangerously weak and ill-informed political decisions. The government’s high risk development plan is to increase large oil bunkering facilities, further adding major dangers to the marine environment and resilience of the country. Maldives is notoriously ill-prepared and ill-equipped for ecological disasters, consistent with its dismal record on environmental protection and preservation.
A further indicator of institutional failure is the Maldives Supreme Court’s recent decision in the civil litigation case for a temporary injunction to stop the Gulhifalhu dredging and reclamation project. The administrative capacity of the courts to handle this public interest case for an emergency interim injunction is profoundly weak, taking a year to conclude with the loss of the remedy sought. In this seminal case, national and international environmental protection laws including the precautionary principle to protect the environment were all dismissed in blatant support of dredging contracts with foreign transnational corporations, backed by the Dutch State. In Europe, laws exist to get such polluters to pay. This case has shown that European companies operating in the Maldives can demand payment for their business of polluting and destroying the environment, and national environmental protection laws are not applicable to them.
False Narratives Of Development & Adaptation
The government of Maldives continues to push a false narrative, in collusion with extractivist transnational dredging corporations, foreign governments, questionable foreign finance, investors and banks, that dredging and reclamation is the only way to develop the country. For decades, “development” in the Maldives has been synonymous with dredging and reclamation, with every project driving the country towards multi-million dollar public debts. Simultaneously, communities have systematically lost their sustainable food, livelihood resources and resilience, suffering the social and economic deprivations of perniciously induced migration and the uncertainties this brings. Today, as the realities of climate change become magnified worldwide, the same actors are re-labelling their extractivism as “climate adaptation”.
The irony of the falsehood of “development dredging” is that dredging and reclamation are permanently and irreversibly destroying finite natural resources on which critical economies including fishery, tourism and community livelihoods entirely depend. The biodiversity sector accounts for 98% of the country’s exports. Dredging “development” leaves the Maldives’ finite sustainable natural assets permanently destroyed, and the country exposed to poverty and debt. Land reclamation over the past 20 years have showed no improvement to the quality of life or life chances of the Maldivian people, with so-called reclaimed land lying unused in most cases, as wealth inequality rises. The persistent narrative of reef destruction, degradation or complete erasure to be synonymous with “development” continues to deprive communities socially, culturally and economically. It also undermines the potential for climate resilience and future safety of our islands.
The irony of the falsehood of “climate adaptation dredging” is that coastal modification and maladaptation using dredging and reclamation destroys the natural reef defences of communities beyond climate resilience. This activity only provides further business opportunities for dredging corporations because these are maladaptation projects requiring a cycle of repeated ‘protection’ once the natural reef defences are permanently disrupted or destroyed with no hope of revival. The depletion of sand resources due to dredging and reclamation, as well as the ignored levels of ecosystem decimation and destruction exposes the Maldivian people to further climate vulnerability, poverty and future instability. The winners in this development are the foreign corporations and politicians involved in these activities who “profit” from these projects at the expense of the Maldivian people. The Maldivian public is left with the destruction, threats, dangers and the mounting debt these developments impose for generations to come.
Abuse Of Natural Resources
What these fluid narratives attempt to hide is that in addition to destroying natural reef defences, the country’s sand resources are also being heavily exploited for the profit-making activities of dredging corporations with absolute impunity. Notably, marine sand mining is prohibited by law and inaccessible to the Maldivian people, while freely available to extractivist corporations through these major sand extraction projects. There is no value or valuation of marine sand taken freely by these projects, which is a fast-depleting finite public resource. The impacts of such sand mining or reef destruction are never studied, being another easy way to hide and ignore the ravages of corporate extractivism in the country.
The wasteful and excessive abuse of sand resources to conduct the Gulhifalhu land reclamation project is estimated to have cost 24.5 million cubic meters of sand extracted from an area of 18 square kilometers in north Male’ atoll, with unstudied negative impacts. This activity directly contravened environmental protection laws in the Maldives Constitution. The project contract made with foreign corporations was made with the recognition that the contractor could demand exorbitant penalty charges regardless of violation of national laws during the project’s implementation. The governance weaknesses of the Maldives is laid bare by such contracts, as the country’s national sovereignty and laws are undermined by a foreign transnational corporation backed by a foreign government. The latest biggest reclamation at Fushidhiggaru lagoon is expected to extract 41 million cubic metres of sand. The neighbouring community of Gulhi was dispossessed of its reef fishery resource on Fushidhiggaru lagoon, by the misuse of presidential decree laws. The contractual arrangements for this particular project is equally questionable, opaque and concerning, involving the same foreign actors as the Gulhifalhu project.
Call for Community Climate Action
The global climate crisis is clear.
What it means to the Maldives is clear.
The national climate crisis is being expanded and manufactured by “development dredging” and “adaptation dredging”.
The winners are the foreign corporations, politicians and their affiliates.
The losers are the people of the Maldives, both present and future generations.
This is an existential crisis at multiple levels.
Recognising the gravity of this crisis, we call on communities across the country to protect our precious natural islands, our reef ecosystems, biodiversity, wildlife, sand resources, food sources and all the protective defences nature has provided our islands for millennia.
The protection of our islands, our food and livelihood resources must come from us.
We must individually and collectively take urgent climate action to protect our islands and our ocean home from all threats of destruction, loss and damage.
Our lives depend on preventing the loss of all nature essential to sustain life in the Maldives.
– END –