The Maldives is an 820-kilometre-long chain of nearly 1,200 islands dotting the Indian Ocean. The nation has become one of the most popular luxury tourism destinations in the world because of its Instagrammable beaches and its advertising slogan: “the sunny side of life”. But the Maldives is also one of the countries most vulnerable to sea-level rise. With 80% of its land less than one meter  above sea level, some scientists predict that the islands could be completely submerged by 2100. In an effort to keep the country above water and thriving, the government is adopting a strategy used by many nations around the globe: land reclamation...

Dutch planners are often considered the founders of land reclamation, with a history of water engineering going back some 800 years. Over the centuries, land-forming projects have shaped some of the world’s major cities, including Singapore, London, New York and Miami. In recent decades, most of the reclaimed land has been in East Asia. In China, Shanghai has reclaimed 350 square kilometres  — more than three times the size of Paris — over the past few decades. Colombo has added 100 km2 in just 4 years, and 65 km2 of Mumbai is reclaimed. A study on twenty-first-century coastal-land reclamation found that of 135 large coastal cities with populations of more than one million people, 75% had reclaimed land.

With projects stretching back to 1997, the Maldives is a veteran of large-scale land reclamation…Although the nation’s territory covers 90,000 km2, more than 99% of it is ocean. The Maldives’ 1,200 islands are all atolls — rings of coral reef that surround lagoons. When the government decides to reclaim land, it takes sand from the lagoons using boats outfitted with suction pipes, which collect sand and coral debris from the ocean floor like giant vacuum cleaners. The boat then deposits the material in a different spot, either inside or outside the atoll, to form new land. Sometimes reclamation projects fill in the entire lagoon…. [However, these projects] destroy coral reefs and seagrass meadows and harm the fishing and tourism industries…’

“Islands can’t occur anywhere,” says Virginie Duvat, a coastal geographer at La Rochelle University in France, who has studied the effects of land reclamation in the Maldives. “If you put an island where there was naturally no island, you create vulnerable land and you will necessarily have to build strong engineered structures, breakwaters and sea walls,” she says…In a 2019 study4, Duvat and Alexandre Magnan, a geographer at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations — Sciences Po in Paris, assessed the scale of coastal changes that humans had made to 107 inhabited islands in the Maldives between 2004–06 and 2014–16. On almost half the islands, the researchers found significant degradation in the reefs’ abilities to weaken waves and provide natural sources of sediments. One-fifth of the islands had almost entirely or entirely “lost their natural capacity to respond and adjust to ocean climate-related pressures”, the researchers say. “It means that a decision you have taken one day to rely on reclaimed land will necessarily cause you to invest more money,” says Duvat. “You are locked into the engineered path for decades and decades and potentially the rest of the century.”=

Excerpts from Jesse Chase-Lubitz, The Maldives is racing to create new land. Why are so many people concerned?, Nature, Apr. 24, 2024