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Maldivian Cabinet holds underwater meeting

Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed signs a decree at an underwater Cabinet meeting off Girifushi Island yesterday. Ministers in full scuba gear met on the sea bed to draw attention to the dangers of global warming for the island nation, a tourist paradise featuring coral reefs and white sand beaches with most parts lying less than 1m above sea level. Scientists have warned it could be uninhabitable in less than 100 years. PHOTO: AFP

The Maldivian government yesterday held an underwater Cabinet meeting in a bid to focus global attention on rising sea levels that threaten to submerge the island nation.

Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed plunged first into the Indian Ocean followed by his ministers, all clad in scuba gear, for the nationally televised meeting in this archipelago known as an idyllic holiday getaway for the rich.

Nasheed and his deputy, Mohamed Waheed, and a dozen ministers sat behind tables arranged in a horseshoe at a depth of 6m and approved a resolution calling for global action to cut carbon emissions.

After surfacing, Nasheed called for the UN’s climate summit in Copenhagen in December to forge a deal to reduce carbon emissions blamed for rising sea levels that experts say could swamp the Maldives by the century’s end.

“We should come out of Copenhagen with a deal that will ensure that everyone will survive,” said the 42-year-old president as he bobbed in the shimmering turquoise waters.

He said there was “less talk” during the half-hour underwater meeting, but he had managed to get more work done.

“The president, vice president and the Cabinet signed a declaration calling for concerted global action on climate change, ahead of the UN climate conference,” the president’s office said in a statement.

The ministers signed the resolution, printed on a white board, using water-proof markers.

The ministers had taken diving lessons for the last two months and were accompanied by their trainers as they staged the unprecedented underwater meeting off the islet of Girifushi. The dive was the latest publicity stunt by the media-savvy Nasheed to focus world attention on climate change and its effects on the low-lying Maldives ahead of the Copenhagen meeting.

In 2007, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that an increase in sea levels of 18cm to 59cm would make the country uninhabitable by 2100.

Nasheed, the archipelago’s first democratically elected president, stunned the world last year when he announced he wanted to buy a homeland to relocate the threatened Maldives.

More than 80 percent of the tiny atoll nation, famed as a tourist paradise due to its coral reefs and white-sand beaches, is less than 1m above sea level.

Only Nasheed and his defense minister Ameen Faisel had any diving experience before the president came up with the plan for the underwater meeting, officials said.

The government’s spokeswoman Aminath Shauna said the ­ministers had signed their wetsuits and these would be auctioned on a protectmaldives.com Web site to be launched at the weekend to raise money for coral reef protection.

“All the arrangements went ahead well,” she said, adding the ministers would ride bicycles around the capital island, Male, next week as a further sign of their commitment to cutting down emissions.
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