REPORT
Malé built to be climate-resilient and to alleviate overcrowding elsewhere on the archipelago. It’s elevated more than 6.5ft above current sea levels and ringed by coastal defences that form a buffer between land and sea. It’s hoped Hulhumalé will eventually house a quarter of a million people. Other schemes deploy solutions
that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1995 dystopian adventure film, Waterworld. A floating city is being created in the Maldives in a collaboration with specialist Dutch firm Waterstudio. It will be moored a 10-minute boat ride from the capital Malé. The first 60 houses are currently being constructed on platforms in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and will be towed 470 miles to the Maldives before the next monsoon. “A total of 5,000 units, housing
15,000 people, are slated by 2030,” says the firm’s principal architect Koen Olthuis — and this is just the beginning. “The story of vanishing islands is often told as a tragedy: land
disappearing and cultures displaced. But I see it as the beginning of an innovation-driven evolution.” “The real question is no longer how
do we stop the water but what can evolve on water? We can’t save every grain of sand, but we can protect the identity, culture and community that define these islands.” Floating cities aren’t feasible for
many places in the firing line. The cruel irony is that the nations with the most negligible carbon footprints are the ones bearing the full force of the effects — without the funds to combat it. “It’s fundamentally unjust,” says Justin Francis, of Responsible Travel, an operator that specialises in trips that benefit local communities and nature. “The costs [of major infrastructural
adaptations] are out of reach for many small island states,” says Ambassador Ilana Seid. “Take the Marshall Islands example: in order to reclaim land to build resilience, the cheque sizes are multiples of their annual GDP.”
Their best approach is often low-
budget, localised measures such as reef restoration or the planting of mangrove trees to help sediment accumulation and to dissipate wave energy — so-called nature-based adaptation (NBA). With support from the World Bank
and other donors, Kiribati — a Central Pacific island group with around 120,000 inhabitants — has embarked on such a scheme with marked success. Nearly 40,000 seedlings have been planted on the fringes of a string of its islands such as Aranuka and North Tarawa. Survival rates of the seedlings were around 90% after the first year in some places, a heartening statistic and a promising sign of what coordinaed local action can achieve.
Conscious travel For the responsible traveller, the world’s vanishing islands present a quandary. The urge to visit destinations renowned for their
unrivalled natural beauty and rich cultural traditions before it’s too late — what is sometimes marketed as ‘last-chance tourism’ — is strong. Yet there’s an equally powerful desire not to contribute to the problem via the carbon footprint required to reach such fragile corners of the earth. It’s a dilemma shared by the often
tourism-dependent island nations themselves. Jamaica, for example, is still reeling from the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa in October. The storm’s wind speeds were clocked at a record-breaking 252mph prior to making landfall on the Caribbean island, and fed by climate change-fuelled marine warming, such megastorms will only become more common. Across the globe, island nations find themselves nervously positioned on the frontline. Yet Jamaica can’t hope to rebuild
from damage estimated at a third of the country’s GDP without the US $4.3bn (£3.3bn) that tourism brings to the island each year. The first priority
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