A new Maldives

In November, Mohamed Nasheed, in the immediate aftermath of being voted in as the new president of the Maldives, announced plans to purchase a new homeland for his country's roughly 350,000 citizens. Concerned that rising sea levels caused by global warming could submerge the atolls, President Nasheed announced that his government was considering buying land from other countries – notably India, Sri Lanka and Australia – as an "insurance measure" to protect citizens from ending up in environmental refugee camps. For this purpose, President Nasheed said that Male would begin to set aside a yet-undisclosed portion of his government's revenue from tourism in a sovereign wealth fund.

President Nasheed's Global Warming Relocation Fund (a plan that has actually been discussed for several years under the previous government of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom) may sound drastic, but the Maldives has already tried other options, which have proven costly. For instance, starting in the early 1990s, an artificial buffer was constructed to protect Male from rising sea levels. The barrier consists of a series of structures known as tetrapods, concrete blocks that can be stacked together in interlocking rows to form a wall. The wall has gaps to allow sea water to pass through, while the size of the structure allows it to absorb the force of waves and protects the shoreline from storm surges. This massive project came with a hefty price tag, however, costing a total of USD 63 million, even while the efficacy of the barrier is still debated today. Based on this experience, President Nasheed argues that the high cost of expanding the wall to circumvent the country's 200 inhabited islands would be far more expensive and complex than relocating the entire population.