Male´ - the Maldivian capital and the most densely populated island in the world, with more than 110,000 people crammed onto 1.77 square kilometres of land - required tens of millions of dollars spent on a three-metre sea wall to keep the ocean out.
”The science here is very sorted,” Nasheed says. ”They say there is a window of opportunity of about seven or eight years.”
For some in this archipelago, that window is already closed. Already, 14 of 200 inhabited islands are gone. Coastal erosion has made their seaside villages unliveable. A further 70 islands rely on desalinated drinking water because aquifers have been overcome by seawater. At least 80 per cent of the Maldivian landmass is less than a metre above sea level, the archipelago’s highest point a mere 2.4 metres above high tide.
A sea-level rise of 59 centimetres over the next century, the upper limit forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, would render most of the Maldives uninhabitable.
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