New Delhi
23 October 2009
Meet the new poster boy of climate change. He is Mohamed Nasheed (42), the
first democratically elected President in the history of the Maldives.
President Nasheed has the moral authority and his voice evokes tremendous resonance
in India and around the world, Shyam Saran, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Special
Envoy for Climate Change, said.
The reasons are not far to seek.
President Nasheed has donned scuba gear and held an underwater cabinet meeting to
highlight the danger of global warming. He believes that climate change is no less a
threat than Islamic radicalism or piracy.
He has cast Maldives as a frontline state in the fight against climate change, and
expects key world powers to come to its rescue just as they defended Poland in World
War II.
For the Maldives, an archipelago of 1,200 tropical islands just a few metres above sea
level, climate change is a clear and present danger. Sea-level rise of even half a metre
will make much of it uninhabitable.
President Nasheed's fight against rising sea levels has become a cause celebre for
green campaigners and yet, he almost did not make it to the 7 to 18 December United
Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
He wanted to opt out because his country, hit by the global economic crisis, could ill-
afford the cost of his travels. Denmark has since said that the tab will be borne by the
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The Maldives will be the worst-hit by the consequences of climate change and therefore,
it wants the developed and the developing countries to forge a consensus and to arrive
at a politically acceptable solution at Copenhagen.
For that to happen, he advocates a shift in emphasis from reducing consumption -- which
the developed world is demanding -- to increasing investments in renewable sources of
energy.
Nasheed told a seminar at the Observer Research Foundation here Friday that he tried to
change his own lifestyle by "switching off" only to realise that life without cars, ice cream
or going to clubs is hardly a solution.
So now, he said in half-jest, he is a votary of living the good life but with a caveat: Go
green, embrace renewables, so that the integrity of the mathematics of per capita
emissions is upheld.
Mr Saran said that President Nasheed's concerns for the Maldives are just as relevant
for India, which too has low-lying coastal places and islands.
A new UK Government map illustrating the consequences of climate change warns of
specific threats to the Indian sub-continent, such as decrease in rice yield of up to 30 per
cent and millions of climate refugees due to rising sea levels.
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