THE INDIAN Ocean state of the Maldives will start to divert cash from its largest industry, tourism, to buy land in case rising sea levels submerge the country's low-lying coral islands, spokespeople for the new president have announced.
Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik, the new vice-president, said the "worst-case scenario due to sea-level rise would be that some or even all of our islands would become uninhabitable and we would have to look for alternative places for Maldivians to live".
A new sovereign wealth fund, modelled on those in oil-rich Middle Eastern states, "is part of our longer-term perspective", Mr Waheed said, and would be preceded by an overhaul of state finances in the tourism-dependent country.
Eighty per cent of the country's 1,200 islands - of which 200 are inhabited - are less than one metre above sea level, and studies have said they could be submerged within 100 years.
The government of new president Mohamed Nasheed was sworn in yesterday after the country's first democratic election, ending 30 years of authoritarian rule by president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.
Mr Gayoom, who has been accused of human rights abuses and criticised for his tight control over the nation's 380,000 residents, has raised the link internationally between climate change and the human rights of potentially displaced citizens.
However, Scott Leckie, director of Displacement Solutions, a Swiss-based refugee consultancy, warned: "We don't know where they plan to buy this land or whether they have thought it through . . . Are they actually asking to re- establish the Maldives elsewhere?"
Other low-lying states such as Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea were already starting to feel the effects of rising sea levels, Mr Leckie said.
In October, a formal request was made by Australia's Green Party for the country to grant special visas to Tuvalan climate change refugees, but the request was denied.
"The question [of relocation] needs to be sorted out by all 50 territories that stand to be affected by rising sea levels," Mr Leckie said.
He added that there were "rumours Maldivian officials have already started to buy plots of land in Sri Lanka for the future".
Mr Waheed said the new government would seek international help to strengthen the natural barriers of the Maldives's coral reefs and to create artificial sections of reef as a buffer against rising seas.
It has also pledged to introduce solar power and seek foreign investment in other alternative energy technologies.
Like the previous government, though, Mr Nasheed has no plans to cut the polluting longhaul flights on which tourism depends.
Instead, his Maldivian Democratic Party says it will introduce corporate taxation in the industry as part of a raft of fiscal reforms.