Press Statement
20 March 2024
On 17 March 2024, the Maldives Marine Research Institute issued an alert stating that:
“We have noticed that localized bleaching has started in some places in the Maldives. The current NOAA forecast is looking dire over the next few weeks.”
Scientists globally have been raising concerns about the record breaking global temperatures in 2023, the occurrence of El Niño that is adding to it and the continuing record-breaking sea-surface temperatures (SST) in 2024. We know that corals are living organisms that are highly susceptible to even small temperature changes and die under such high heat conditions. On 11 March 2024, the Maldives Meteorological Service tweeted saying that the ‘feels like’ temperature that day exceeded 42°C.
We are aware that the current forecast and serious concerns raised by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch (CRW) programme reported by Reuters on 5 March 2024 states that:
“We are literally sitting on the cusp of the worst bleaching event in the history of the planet”.
The potential impacts compelled Australian NGO Climate Council to describe the increasing heat levels on the Great Barrier Reef as an ‘underwater bushfire’.
We know that in the Maldives, every bleaching event has had disastrous consequences on our living reef systems, upon which our economies, livelihoods and lives depend. Maldives has suffered greatly from repeated bleaching events over the past years, including the mass bleaching events of 1998 and 2016. The 1998 coral bleaching event had devastating impacts on our reefs:
“Most of the islands are surrounded by coral reefs that were in good to excellent condition prior to 1998, when the massive El Niño climate change switch resulted in coral bleaching and approximately 90% mortality of all corals on most Maldivian reefs, reducing many sites to 2% live coral cover.“
Our reefs take years and decades to recover from every such devastation and the Maldives’ institutional ability to study these impacts is as severely limited as our political and governance ability to make evidence-based decisions and act on the science.
According to the latest available State of the Environment Report of Maldives 2016:
“The biodiversity sector of the Maldives contributes to 71% of the nation’s employment, 49% of public revenue, 62% of foreign exchange, 98% of exports and 89% of GDP.”
Despite the clear evidence and recognition of the critical importance of our marine biodiversity sector for our physical and economic survival, our ability to protect and sustain our marine resources is being severely compromised by both national and international actors. This is primarily due to widespread, unchecked and unsustainable so-called ‘development’ activities which involve dredging, reclamation and coastal modification and the devastating impacts these have on marine life and habitat.
Dredging and reclamation across the country are resulting in the irreversible loss of finite coral reef ecosystems, biodiversity and the ecosystem services on which we depend for our income source, climate resilience and protection. These activities undermine our ability to survive and thrive in the Maldives.
Given the clarity of the science and the situation, we call on President Mohamed Muizzu to show leadership and courage to immediately stop the devastating damage being inflicted on our coral reefs and biodiversity on a daily basis by dredging and reclamation activities. The survival of our reef system foundations depend on this. We must not continue to bury our living coral reefs with dredging sediment and sand. We must act now to stop this aggressive and unforgivable stress on our reefs which are now being subjected to global boiling.
