Amidst the escalating diplomatic tensions between India and Canada, India has now suspended the issuance of visas to Canadian citizens “until further notice.”
Can tourism positively impact climate change in the Indian Ocean?
02.09.2023 - 10:15 / nationalgeographic.com
For anyone heading to Indian Ocean beaches from colder climates, the region’s warm waters have an obvious appeal. But with sea levels rising faster here on average than in the Atlantic and Pacific, many of those beaches are at risk of being claimed by the tides — threatening the natural habitats and livelihoods of people living in coastal areas. This is a global problem, of course: sea levels worldwide have risen around 10cm in the past 30 years, with the rate increasing from 1.5mm a year through most of the 20th century to 3.9mm a year now. Projections for future sea level rises vary greatly, but when you’re in the Maldives, whose highest points rise to just over two metres above sea level, every centimetre counts.
Although it’s widely known that melting polar ice leads to rising sea levels, fewer people are aware of how ‘thermal expansion’ is also a key factor. Because water molecules above 4C spread out as they warm up, if you extrapolate that effect across an ocean, warmer water will noticeably expand in volume. Although it seems counter-intuitive, this doesn’t all get distributed evenly across the world’s oceans, and the expanded sea water tends to ‘pile up’ in places. Sea level rises are happening at different rates on different coasts, but in the Indian Ocean — much of which lies in the tropics — waters tend to be warmer than in any other ocean, and rising faster as a result.
One of the most direct approaches to tackling the consequences, if not the causes, of rising sea levels can be seen just to the north east of the Maldivian capital, Malé, where a reclaimed island, Hulhumalé, has been taking shape since 1997. It was intended to relieve pressure on one of the world’s most densely populated plots of land, and the fact the man-made island is two metres above sea level — twice the elevation of Malé and most other islands in the Maldives — means it also buys the population more time in its existential struggle.
Land reclamation of the kind that has created Hulhumalé is only possible in a few places, however, and comes with its own environmental problems — the dredging involved scoops sand from the centre of the lagoons and redistributes it onto the new island, damaging coral reefs in the process. It also doesn’t address the loss of what’s there already. Over in Mauritius, the government has estimated that half of the island’s white sandy beaches will be eroded within the next 50 years as seas continue to rise. A refuge centre for local residents opened this year in the east-coast village of Quatre Soeurs as a space to evacuate to during future record high tides and storm surges. Sea walls built of volcanic rock now protect some of Mauritius’s coastal fringes, but this is only a partial solution.
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