Government ministers in scuba gear prepared on Friday to hold an underwater meeting of the Maldives’ Cabinet to highlight the threat global warming poses to the lowest-lying nation on earth.
The Maldives’ President will lead Saturday’s meeting around a table on the sea floor — 6m below the surface — and ministers will communicate using white boards and hand signals.
President Mohammed Nasheed has emerged as a key, and colourful, voice on climate change amid fears that rising ocean levels could swamp this Indian Ocean archipelago within a century. Its islands average 2.1m above sea level.
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Mr. Nasheed is also a certified diver, while other ministers have had to take diving lessons in recent weeks.
“None of the ministers have ever been diving before, except the Defence Minister, and all of them are very enthusiastic,” Zoona Naseem, president of Divers Association Maldives, said in a statement from the President’s office.
Mr. Nasheed has already announced plans for a fund to buy a new homeland for his people if the 1,192 low-lying coral islands are submerged. He has promised to make the Maldives, with a population of 3,50,000, the world’s first carbon-neutral nation within a decade.
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The underwater Cabinet plans to sign a document calling on all countries to cut down their carbon dioxide emissions ahead of a major U.N. climate change conference in December in Copenhagen, where countries will negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are blamed for causing global warming by trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere.
Wealthy nations want broad emissions cuts from all countries, while poorer ones say industrialised countries should carry most of the burden.
On Friday, the Maldives ministers went diving for rehearsals off the island of Girifushi, about 20 minutes by speedboat from the capital, Male, said Aminath Shauna, an official from the President’s office.
Three of the 14 ministers will miss the underwater meeting because two were not given medical permission and another is abroad, Mr. Shauna said.