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In a novel way to highlight the threat of global warming, the Maldives president, vice president, cabinet secretary and 11 ministers staged a 30 minute underwater meeting on Saturday calling on all countries to cut their carbon dioxide emissions.

President Mohammed Nasheed and 13 other government officials donned scuba gear and took their seats at a table on the sea floor — 20 feet (6 meters) below the surface of a lagoon off Girifushi, an island usually used for military training.

Nasheed, who has emerged as a key, and colourful, voice on climate change, is a certified diver, but the others had to take diving lessons in recent weeks.

The beautiful Maldives islands are a popular tourist resort welcoming more than 600,000 visitors each year. With a backdrop of coral, Saturday’s meeting was a bid to draw attention to fears that rising sea levels caused by the melting of polar ice caps could swamp this Indian Ocean archipelago within a century. Its islands average 7 feet (2.1 meters) above sea level.

And it’s not only the Maldives that are under threat. Shanghai, altitude roughly 3 meters (10 feet) above sea level, is among dozens of great world cities — including London, Miami, New York, New Orleans, Mumbai, Cairo, Amsterdam and Tokyo — threatened by sea levels that now are rising twice as fast as projected just a few years ago, expanding from warmth and meltwater. Estimates of the scale and timing vary, but Stefan Rahmstorf, a respected expert at Germany’s Potsdam Institute, expects a 1-meter (3-foot) rise in this century and up to 5 meters (15 feet) over the next 300 years.

Nearly a quarter of mankind lives in low-lying coastal areas, and urbanization is drawing still more people into them.

“The tendency of coastal and port locations to become playgrounds for architects and developers has become a global phenomenon in recent decades,” says Gordon McGranahan, director of the human settlements group at the International Institute for Environment and Development, an independent think tank in London.

McGranahan helped author a 2007 report by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development that put the number of people living in areas vulnerable to such flooding at 40 million people, with trillions of dollars of homes and other assets at risk. By the 2070s, the number could rise to nearly 150 million, it says.

The Maldives meeting and the OECD report send a clear message that we need to act quickly. But what is the solution? As more and more dry land comes under threat will we start to see more towns constructed in rural areas? And if so, what damage will this do to the countryside and the farming industry?

Tags: carbon footprint, cut carbon emissions, global warming, green jobs, Maldives, melting polar ice caps, renewable energy jobs, rising sea levels, underwater cabinet meeting

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 8:55 am and is filed under Renewable Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.