The Rise Hulhumale

[Laylow Skidmore]

TheMaldives are well known as a bucket list getaway. Hearing the country's name conjures up images of luxury huts overlooking an aqua blue ocean. But climate change may cross the country off the map completely.

The archipelago, which is made up of over 1,100 coral islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is the lowest lying nation in the world. Therefore, sea level rise caused by global climate change is an existential threat to the island nation. At the current rate of global warming, almost 80% of the Maldives could become uninhabitable by 2050, according to multiple reports from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

\"Our islands are slowly being inundated by the sea, one by one,\" Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, the president of the Maldives, told the U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP26, earlier this week. \"If we do not reverse this trend, the Maldives will cease to exist by the end of this century.\"

The islands that are home to local Maldivians, not the resort islands, stand to lose the most. Mohammed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives and a leading voice for climate change equity, told ABC News that more than 90% of islands in the Maldives have severe erosion, and 97% of the country no longer has fresh groundwater.

Ibrahim Mubbasir and his family live on the island of Dhiffushi. It is suffering from severe erosion, and flooding has increased from two or three times a year to twice a month. Four years ago, the family's well became unusable because of salt water contamination, leaving them to rely on collecting rainwater. Mubbasir said they only have enough fresh water to last for three more months.

\"Things that we thought would happen towards the end of the century, we are experiencing now,\" Aminath Shauna, the Maldives' minister of environment, climate change and technology, told ABC News' Ginger Zee.

Shauna said that more than 50% of the national budget is spent on adapting to climate change. When asked what the Maldives will look like in 2050, Shauna responded, \"Are you willing to take the Maldives as climate refugees? I think that's the conversation that needs to happen.\"

And it's not just the Maldives. Island countries around the world have been asking developed nations for funds since 2009. Countries with the highest greenhouse gas emissions -- China, the United States and India -- are mostly responsible for the rapid sea level rise.

In 2016, the Maldives lost their front line of defense when a bleaching event affected about 60% of the coral reefs, according to Aya Naseem, a marine biologist and co-founder of the Maldives Coral Institute.

Without coral reefs, the islands are wide open to the rising waters. Naseem said they have one realistic choice: They need to build back and protect the reefs, \"because IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is predicting that by 2050 if the temperature rises 1.5 degrees Celsius we can lose 70 to 90% of corals in the whole world.\"

\"It's much cheaper than building a seawall. I think it costs something like $3,000 to grow a meter of sea wall where for the coral a meter of it is about $300, including monitoring and everything,\" she said.

Bebe Ahmed, founder of \"Save the Beach,\" travels island to island in the Maldives with the mission of teaching kids about restoring and protecting coral. He told ABC News that his dream is to inspire young Maldivians to want to start their own projects to restore coral reefs.

The Maldives is home to the Modular Artificial Reef Structure, or MARS, a coral-forming project on the resort island of Summer Island. to the coral forming project, MARS. The project has 3D-printed bases that are placed in the water with transplant corals attached to them. The hope is that the system is designed with the specific needs of the coral farm in mind, providing a permanent structure for coral to grow.

In the late '90s, the Maldives began construction on the island of Hulhumale through the process of land reclamation. Hulhumale is 6.5 feet above sea level, more than double the height of Male, the current capital of the Maldives. It is possible this island may be a future site for relocation of Maldivians suffering from sea level rise. Maldivians call their manmade island the City of Hope.

The future of the Maldives could also come in the form of a floating city. In 2022, just a few miles from the dense, capital city of Male, construction and assembly will begin on the world's first true floating city. The unique solution will not have to worry about sea level rise, because it will always be on top of the sea.

The project is being developed and led by Dutch Docklands in the Netherlands. Lead architect Koen Olthuis gave ABC News an inside look at how the floating city is designed and what it should eventually look like.

\"By being on the water we want to take advantage of the water -- and using the coolness of the water -- so these are water-cooled cities, for which you take cool water outside the atoll and pump water through the route and activate the air conditioning systems,\" Olthius said.

It gained publicity for the plan announced by former president Mohamed Nasheed in 2008 to purchase land elsewhere so the population could relocate should sea level rise make the islands uninhabitable.

But the mood has changed here recently. The new government, under president Abdulla Yameen, no longer seeks land to buy, but is instead determined for the nation to stay put and resist the rising seas with geoengineering projects.

The key to the new strategy is renting out islands and using the money to reclaim, fortify and even build new islands. People living on smaller lower-lying islands could then be relocated to more flood-resistant islands when needed.

Much of the island still looks like a construction site with mountains of sand piled up, but, according to the shiny plastic model I am shown, when finished in 2023 it will be able to accommodate about 130,000 people.

Nasheed thinks Saudi Arabia is seeking to secure its oil trade routes to China, which recently became dangerous due to widespread piracy, by establishing a big base en route in the Maldives. It is expected that the Saudis would also develop the atoll for projects in tourism and maritime commerce.

A study of Funafuti Atoll in the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, published in 2014, showed that monsoon winds and storms that break up coral and deposit sand on the atolls can help the islands grow naturally.

Another problem with reclamation is that by pumping sand onto the reefs, surrounding corals gradually become covered too and die out. This adds to the pressure they are already experiencing from warmer waters that make them bleach and sometimes die.

As I leave the islands I am left overwhelmed by conflicting impressions and wondering what the future really holds for the Maldives. Stunning white beaches and colourful tropical fish, sea turtles and sharks contrast sharply with fields of dead, bleached coral, island building sites and a huge amount of plastic waste on the beaches.

February 3, 1997JPEGFebruary 19, 2020JPEG View Image Comparison View Both Images With more than 80 percent of its 1,190 coral islands standing less than 1 meter above sea level, the Maldives has the lowest terrain of any country in the world. This makes the archipelago in the Indian Ocean particularly vulnerable to sea level rise.

With global sea level rising 3 to 4 millimeters per year, and that rate expected to rise in coming decades, some analysts anticipate a grim future for the Maldives and other low-lying islands. One study concluded that low-lying islands could become uninhabitable by 2050 as wave-driven flooding becomes more common and freshwater becomes limited. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes anticipates sea level could rise by about half a meter by 2100 even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced or rise up to 1 meter if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase strongly.

The new island, built by pumping sand from the seafloor onto a submerged coral platform, rises about 2 meters above sea level, about twice as high as Mal. The extra height could make the island a refuge for Maldivians who are eventually driven off lower-lying islands due to rising seas. It could also prove to be an option for evacuations during future typhoons and storm surges.

Hulhumal is not the only island in the Maldives that has seen major changes since the 1990s. Reclamation projects have enlarged several other atolls in similar ways in recent decades. Among them is Thilafushi, a lagoon to the west that has became a fast-growing landfill and a common location for trash fires (note the smoke plume blowing to the southwest in the 2020 image). Gulhifalhuea is the site of another land reclamation project that is opening up new manufacturing and industrial space.There is one piece of positive news: natural processes on coral reef atolls (like those in the Maldives) might make the islands more resistant to sea level rise than their low elevations might initially suggest. Multiple studies, many of which use Landsat observations, show that most coral atoll islands in the Maldives and elsewhere have remained stable or even grown larger in recent decades.

Scientists are still studying why, but some research indicates that storms and floods that wash over islands can move offshore sediment onto the island surface, building the island up in the process. Other research shows that healthy coral reefs can grow upward even when seas are rising by producing abundant sediment.

Raising the heights of islands and building completely new ones are among solutions to climate change-related sea-level rise for the Maldives and other low-lying, small island developing states, scientists say in a new study.

According to the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by mid-century one billion people will be exposed to much greater risks of flooding due to sea level rise and face storm surges, increased tidal flooding or even permanent submergence.

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