The Maldives is one the most vulnerable countries on earth to the consequences of climate change. Its government has been a strong voice in international forums on climate-related issues. At the same time, its policies at home belie these calls for global action.
Dependent on income from international tourism and anxious to expand its islands through reclamation, recent Maldivian administrations have ignored or compromised on national environmental regulations, been unwilling to enact and implement environmental safeguards, and neglected the concerns of local communities while pursuing development projects. This has been harmful to residents already at risk from the effects of changing weather patterns, rising sea levels, and increased flooding.
Maldives government officials say that reclamation is necessary for a country with a growing population and limited land and assert that the planned purposes—harbors, airports, and artificial islands for tourist resorts and guesthouses—are crucial to the nation’s economic development. However, the government’s failure to enforce environmental protection laws has damaged—sometimes irrevocably—livelihoods from fishing, farming, and other work that is dependent on reefs and wetlands. Poorly regulated development has stripped islands of natural resources and deprived communities of access to fresh water, public land, and natural resources such as fruit trees.
This report describes how the Maldives government’s failure to consult local communities and to adequately mitigate the impact of reclamation and other development projects has harmed island residents. Our research is based on interviews with residents in the northern Maldives island of Kulhudhuffushi and Addu atoll in the south, and in Malé, the capital, and Hulhumale. They described damage to homes and businesses from worsening flooding, and the substantial loss of income from the destruction of natural resources as a result of development projects implemented without adequate regard for environmental protection.
On Kulhudhuffushi, the government overrode environmental regulators and buried 70 percent of the island’s mangroves to construct a new airport. The loss of the mangroves harmed already at-risk local communities, in many cases devastating livelihoods. Five years later the government has still not provided compensation and has pursued other development projects that have damaged the reef. One small business owner described the economic impact. “We used to grow bananas—the trees were torn up for development,” she said. “Now we have to import bananas. Development to us means imported fruits no one has the money for.”
Although the Maldives has adopted several laws to prevent such harm, there is lax enforcement. Crucially, the Environment Protection and Preservation Act mandates environmental impact assessments (EIAs) for all development proposals, but while the process seems good on paper, many projects are preapproved by the government, rendering any EIA irrelevant. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Maldives’ primary environmental regulatory authority, is not independent but operates under the minister of environment, technology and climate change. It lacks the resources to carry out monitoring to ensure that projects heed required mitigation recommendations.
Climate change is an immediate existential threat in the Maldives, with 80 percent of the islands less than a meter above sea level, and many experiencing acute shoreline erosion, saline intrusion, and other effects of climate change. The Maldives government has committed to action on climate change and has sought financial support for adaptation. Countries and institutions providing climate financing should continue to do so but also require the Maldives government to enforce its own environmental protection laws, ensure independent oversight by the Environmental Protection Agency, and consult affected island communities. International climate finance donors should require robust evaluation of reclamation and other development projects for potential harm, and press for implementation of appropriate mitigation measures.
Methodology
Human Rights Watch conducted research into the human rights consequences of development projects on Kulhudhuffushi Island and the southern atoll of Addu between 2019 and 2023, individually interviewing 56 people living on the islands and carrying out group discussions of 7, 8 and 20 people. The group of 20 was all women. We also interviewed current and former government officials on these islands and in the capital Malé. We examined environmental impact assessments (EIAs), photos provided by experts and by local sources, and reviewed local media articles and satellite imagery.
Human Rights Watch wrote to the Maldives Ministry of National Planning, Housing and Infrastructure; the Ministry of the Environment, Climate Change and Technology; the Environmental Protection Agency; and the island councils of Kulhudhuffushi and Addu, seeking their response to our findings. The responses we received are included in the appendix.
Maldives: Politics and Geography
The Republic of Maldives is an archipelago comprising 26 atolls and 1,192 islands. It is the lowest-lying and one of the most geographically dispersed countries on earth.
Until it gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1965, the Maldives was geopolitically isolated. In the early 1970s, the government sought new revenue through tourism, which expanded quickly under President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, whose oppressive dictatorial rule lasted from 1978 until 2008. The Gayoom government established a one-resort, one-island policy, leasing only uninhabited islands to be developed as self-contained resorts. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami devastated the Maldives’ economy, the government expanded island leasing.
Mohamed Nasheed, Maldives’ first democratically elected president, took office in 2008 and highlighted the risks the climate crisis posed to the Maldives. Nasheed was ousted in 2012 and replaced by Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom in 2013.
Leasing and sales of islands for development increased rapidly under President Yameen amid allegations of large-scale corruption by a state-owned corporation that was in charge of leasing and sales of islands. His administration also pursued increased land reclamation to build artificial islands for new resorts. Yameen lost the 2018 election amid corruption allegations and a crackdown on dissent; in 2022 a Maldives criminal court convicted him of money laundering and accepting a bribe in leasing islands and sentenced him to 11 years in prison. President Ibrahim Moahmed Solih took office in 2018 on a platform of promised reforms, including environmental protection.
Tourism continued to expand after 2018, although the Maldives suffered an economic downturn during the Covid-19 pandemic. Tourism accounted for one-third of the national economy by 2023. With this growth, resort owners and government officials have pressed for additional investments in transport infrastructure, including airports and harbors, to service the growing number of island resorts. While tourism has been vital for Maldives’ economic development, unregulated expansion of tourist facilities and infrastructure poses a serious risk to the fragile island ecosystem.
Environmental Governance
Environmental issues fall under the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Technology. The Environmental Protection Agency, a regulatory entity established under the Environment Protection Act in 2008, ostensibly has oversight of development projects, but it lacks independent enforcement authority. Although President Solih pledged in 2019 that his administration would make the EPA an independent entity, it continues to operate under the minister of environment, climate change and technology. In a communication with Human Rights Watch, Ibrahim Naeem, director general of the EPA, stated that according to the government’s strategic action plan, the EPA should have become independent in 2020. He added that he had “no information” as to why the government had not made this happen.
A member of a Malé-based environmental organization told Human Rights Watch:
There is a structural problem in the entire environmental regulatory regime: the Tourism Ministry supersedes all other ministries, particularly when it comes to issues of land. …The EPA does not have a regulatory structure and is housed in the Environment Ministry. There have been talks to make it independent, but no real progress has been made. An EPA official described the situation as “a conflict of interest,” saying “given that the number one developer is the government, it becomes very difficult for us to regulate the government while being part of the government.”
A former EPA official said that even the limited autonomy the EPA once had has been eroded: “A presidential decree requires that the EPA should be governed by a governing board. However, the government has reduced the board to be an administrative board, chaired by a politician nominated by the president.”
A Politicized Environmental Impact Assessment Process
Governments throughout the world have adopted environmental impact assessments (EIA) as a tool to identify environmental risks associated with development projects. However, despite their widespread use, they often fall short because EIA recommendations are not mandatory and in many places have devolved into box-checking exercises.
Common complaints about the EIA process in the Maldives echo those in other countries: failure to enforce requirements that an EIA be completed before commencing a project; pressure to hasten the timeframe for the EIA; limitations on public consultation; and inadequate monitoring after completion of the project.[20] Another critique of EIAs is their short-term time horizon, and failure to consider the long term—for example, sea-level rise and other effects of climate change that are expected to accelerate as the century proceeds.
The Maldives Environment Protection and Preservation Act (EPPA) mandates a rigorous screening process for every EIA, subject to two independent reviews, before a project can be approved. However, according to a former EPA official, despite the anticipated social and environmental costs inevitably enumerated in the assessment reports, planning ministry reclamation projects arrive preapproved before any EIA is carried out, in violation of the EPPA and EIA regulations. After the EIA is done, said a former EPA official, the ministry rejects “most of the recommendations made in an EIA.”
In addition, EIA consultancy firms bidding on government projects are in competition to show they can complete their assessments swiftly. “The EPA does not have the teeth to say it cannot be done in less than three or four weeks,” said an EIA consultant. An EIA consultant also criticized the project-by-project manner assessment approach, saying the authorities failed to integrate these into an overarching environmental policy on development and mitigation practices.
Activists said that reclamation is often done without adequate planning for how the land will be used, and thus in some cases “the reclaimed land mostly sits barren and unused for years.” A fisherman in Addu told Human Rights Watch that a project that had promised housing had failed to deliver: “The Feydhoo reclamation project was completed years back. However, till this day there has been no use of it for anyone except for the dead. Recently they have opened a cemetery in part of the reclaimed area of Feydhoo.” The representative of a fishing community in Addu described how island workers were routinely excluded from development decisions that have an impact on their lives and livelihoods. He said it “will take years for it to become normal. We still haven’t recovered from the [last reclamation] project.”
Access to information about planned development projects is limited. The scoping process that determines what the EIA will cover involves only government entities and the selected EIA consultant, not public interest groups. Environmental activists have also noted that while EIAs are required to be made public online, they are published in English with only the summary in Dhivehi, leaving many residents unable to read them. Island residents without internet may have no access to the EIA. Even if they do have access, the island councils publish little on planned projects. Many island residents said they had never seen EIA reports. Although there is a right-to-information law in the Maldives, requests filed with government ministries for information on development projects face delays or denials.
EIAs must include a list of all those consulted, including officials, civil society groups, residents, fishing communities, and others including diving guides and hotel owners whose livelihoods could be affected. However, for the projects that Human Rights Watch investigated, island residents said that the council or the dominant political party either hand-picks attendees or fails to reach out to communities likely to be otherwise excluded—including women.
One EIA consultant noted that it is crucial to consult women because development projects have a disproportionate impact on their work in the informal sector. “Unless you go and spend time and speak to the women separately, you won’t understand,” the consultant said. Despite this, an EPA official said including women in consultations “varies project to project—if a project requires extensive consultation with women, we will do it.” He did not explain which projects would not need such consultations.
Women who are invited or choose to participate may face reprisals when they speak up. A schoolteacher who was one of only a few women to attend a public consultation on one island, described some of the risks involved in expressing her views. She had raised concerns about a planned development project on the island council’s Facebook page and then faced criticism from her employer and colleagues. “It was awkward for me,” she said. “I have applied to be lead teacher, but I do not think I will get it now as I am seen as critical.” A woman who had joined the public consultations said, “We feel [women] are not heard, not listened to, and no action is taken……