Amundi Japan (which manages a $35 billion fund) is hoping to raise at least $500 million in investment dollars on the back of a booming global appetite for fish. Its pitch is straightforward: As demand for fish grows, the richer those who engage in the industry of fishing become. That includes fishing boat and engine makers, processing plants, chains of seafood and sushi restaurants and, especially, aquaculture or fish farms.

Twinned with the fact that the most-populous countries on the planet – China, India and Brazil – are still growing and growing slightly wealthier, thus more desirous of healthy eating, and it’s looking bad for the planet’s dwindling fish stocks.

That’s not to say there’s not money to be made off fish and all if its ancillary businesses; Amundi’s managers are predicting investors will double their money within six years, as demand continues to grow.

Researchers at Amundi, a merger formed by French-based Credit Agricole and Societe-Generale’s asset management businesses, suggest global seafood consumption will grow from 110 million tons today to more than 132 million tons by 2030. Its public mutual fund will be available for investment beginning August 9 and begin operating on August 20.

The downside, of course, is that as demand for fish goes up the supply goes down. Contrary to some popular opinion, fish are not an infinite resource. Such cynics (realists?) as the World Wildlife Fund predict that at the current rate of taking the world’s bluefin tuna stocks, for example, could expire by 2012 and that all the fish we currently know will be gone by 2050, replaced by fish we currently refuse to take because they are hard to catch or have no taste or jellyfish, the cockroach of the sea.

Critics compare the investment opportunity to offering a rainforest depletion fund or a real estate development project in the middle of a panda refuge.

The so-called “themed investment” fund is the product of investment bankers watching the headlines. “There’s a reasonably good correlation between per capital GDP growth and consumption of fish in emerging markets, which are growing fast with huge populations, so we thought this could be an interesting investment story,” Amundi’s chief investment officer Masato Degawa told the WSJ.

Statistics bear him out: According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, global fish consumption per person has increased to more than 35 pounds a year in 2007 from 23 pounds in 1980. During the same period total production of fish around the globe increased from 72 million to 140 million tons. In China, for example, the average consumption of fish per person increased by nearly five pounds to 58 pounds per person between 2001 and 2007.

The world’s leaders in per-capita-fish-consumption are all in Asia: Despite its rapacious seafood appetite, Japan ranks fourth in the world, with each Japanese eating more than his/her bodyweight in fish, about 155 pounds a year.

The planet’s highest rate is in the Maldives, where each person eats 336 pounds a year! But don’t let those numbers confuse: Japan is still the world’s leader in fish eating. It’s 127 million people eat more than 20 billion pounds of seafood each year, while in the Maldives, its 1,200 islands boasting just 335,000 people, takes just 112 million pounds.

What about the bluefin tuna, which everyone but the Japanese seems to think, is endangered. Tuna fishers and processors are viable investments according to Amundi. “We are not the police,” said Degawa

Some of the news reports of the unique fund as reported in business journals around the globe caution that there may be one potential “sticking point” to the investment: Overfishing.

Hopefully the fund’s salesmen will caution potential investors that if there are no more fish in the sea there won’t be much need for fishing boats, fishing rods or even seafood markets. To that end, Amundi predicts that the bulk of its fish fund investments will be in fish farming, a booming industry, since levels of caught fish have evened off since 1990.

I’m just back recently from the Maldives so read with great interest the Magazine’s profile of the country’s new president Mohamed Nasheed and his struggles with preparing his low-lying country for inevitable sea level rise. Or at least it seems inevitable; there are a couple voices in the story that suggest rising seas may not be an assured thing. I first visited the Maldives in 2005, on assignment for the Times, just weeks after tsunami waves killed eight hundred of its residents.

The Maldives

Jeffrey Gettleman’s profile of a Somali pirate leader, set on land rather than sea, is eye opening, especially on the heels of the series we ran last week about a passenger ship making its way up the coast, dodging pirates. The story paints a picture of battling forces within Somalia, debating the propriety of rebels wreaking havoc on the open seas. While pirate leaders continue to argue that over fishing by international fleets and the complete lack of government in Somalia has lead to the need for piracy, they’re having a hard time selling the argument even at home. The best part of the story was that its “hero” had already burned through several hundred thousand dollars in ransom he’d personally collected, claiming, “It’s not like three people split a million bucks. It’s more like 300.”

Closer to home there’s a fun profile of the coming 40th anniversary of Woodstock in the Style section … which prompted me to search and reread the story I wrote for the Times Magazine about Woodstock on its 25th anniversary. What hasn’t changed in the past fifteen years? The original organizers still don’t get along (though one of the original foursome – John Roberts – passed away in 2001). Will they be able to get their collective shit together and host some kind of 40th bash?

“Perhaps the most impressive thing for us here in the Maldives,” he says, “is that just two years ago I would never had a conversation in public with you like this, not about these subjects. We had to be very careful about everything we wrote, anything we said in public or private, because almost anything could be construed as a potential criticism of the government, thus possibly resulting in recrimination.

“You have to remember that our new president was a journalist turned civil rights activist who was jailed and tortured and once held in solitary confinement for 18 months for criticizing the government. And that wasn’t so long ago.”

Saffah is from one of the southern atolls but has lived in Male most of his life. A writer and editor, he’s traveled outside of the Maldives a few times, has even seen snow, in Bhutan. He volunteered full-time for six months last year to help get the new president elected. His take on the new administration is “so far, so good,” but he admits that as well as a handful of serious environmental issues – which President Mohammed Nasheed has already taken on directly, especially in the court of world opinion – there are other serious issues that need immediate attention.

“Here where we sit, the capital island of Male is one of the most crowded places on earth. One hundred thousand people live on an island just one square mile. In the last few years we have serious problems of drugs and gangs. One third of everyone under twenty-five uses heroin; we have stabbings and murders on the street are frequent. The drugs manage to sneak through the airport or the seaport. It’s becoming a dangerous place to live and the president has to do something about that.” While hopeful, he says he has “mixed opinions about the new administration,” especially concerns that sizable projects are being begun without sufficient public consultation.

My experience in island nations is that it’s hard to talk with locals about long-term environmental issues like climate change and rising seas since their temperament is to look only as far as tomorrow or next week, not decades into the future, a kind of island version of manana.  Faroog agrees that it can be tricky here too. “The impacts of climate change seem very far away to them, which I understand. But we have to keep having those conversations.

“In Male we are just one meter above the sea; they are already building a new island that is two meters above sea level, which should be sufficient in a doomsday scenario. I don’t see that as a solution for Male’s problems. But when those on the outer islands hear the new president talk about creating a fund from tourist revenues to use to buy land to move us one day from the islands … they are indifferent.

“Of course rising seas are our major concern. But so are warming seas, which impact our coral, lead to more erosion, harm the fish life and impact daily life.  Everything here is simple … and everything is connected.”

THE PROBLEM WITH SAND
Intertwined with concerns about rising sea levels and the potential impact on this, the lowest-lying country in the world, are worries about beach erosion. One afternoon this past week I sat on a seemingly hot, calm day and watched as small tidal waves crashed onto the sand beach. Each wave seemed to climb higher up the beach, each washing a new swath of sand off the beach from beneath the mangroves and into the sea.

On some Maldivian islands it’s estimated that four out of eight homes have already been lost to beach erosion. Careful environmental planning has not been the watchword for development here; one concern is that as the population grows and prospers there is more demand for building of homes, work places and new ports. Development requires cement, which needs sand. While efforts have been made in recent years to limit how much of sand for construction can be taken locally and how much needs to be imported, it’s a fine line in the sand here.

Photo: Fiona Stewart

As he and his team hand the fish up onto the dock from the back of the flat-decked boat they fill plastic crate after plastic crate with dorado, blue and yellow fin tuna, skipjack and one sizable barracuda. By law, every fish caught in Maldivian waters has to be caught by “pole and line.” No net fishing, no bottom trawling no seining. Which is a good thing for the health of the fishing grounds, which extend 200 miles off the edges of the Maldives 26 atolls. Yet there are still problems.

Sharks, which used to be prolific here, are largely gone due to over fishing (thanks, as in so many parts of the world, to China’s demand for shark fins). Sea cucumber numbers are quickly declining and the government stopped issuing export licenses for fishing for giant clams to prevent serious exhaustion and possible extinction. Tuna and the other popular edibles, while still abundant, have all diminished for a simple reason: Demand. The permanent population of the Maldives has boomed in the past decade, to nearly 400,000. Add to that the 600,000 tourists now coming every year and the pressure mounts.

“Unfortunately we see the pressure on the fish,” says marine biologist Anke Hofmeister, citing the lobster haul as example. “Sometimes the fishermen will bring in female lobsters with the eggs scraped off, hoping we won’t notice (taking female lobsters is illegal), and often they are smaller than the law permits. But the demand is high from the resorts, so too often some buyers are looking the other way.”

As a percentage of the country’s business, fishing has slipped as tourism has boomed. In the 1970s fishing provided thirty percent of the nation’s revenues; in the 1990s, fifteen percent, in 2000, just six percent. By comparison, tourism now provides over forty percent of the country’s GDP.

Watching these tuna fisherman do their job is one of the wildest fishing scenes I’ve ever seen. A commercial fishing boat here is rudimentary in comparison to much of the rest of the world. Twenty to twenty five feet long, wooden, with a long, flat deck interrupted only by a small, three-sided cabin, which is used mostly for shade during the long, hot days at sea. A long rudder, usually manipulated by the captain’s foot, does the steering.

Eight to ten fishermen (always men, never women) bait long poles and cast off the deck simultaneously, and have been known to reel in more than one thousand tuna in an hour. Boats with automated poles can be even more “productive.”

Half the catch in the Maldives is for local use, the other half is frozen or canned and exported to
Southeast Asia, a $50 million a year enterprise.  Mohammed J. and his four-person crew go out six days a week, motoring at least two hours from home each morning. His take this day for the 150 kilos will be about $375, split among five men. On average, each man will earn around $350 a week.

As the setting sun turns the sky purple and orange I ask how often they see green turtles – illegal to catch, but once a mainstay of the local diet here – and he says “every day.”

“It is hard to watch them just swim by,” he says of the turtles, which can weight up to four hundred pounds. “But we do.”

I trust that he’s telling me the truth, though he looks away as he is answering. It’s hard in these communities for them to change their habits; certainly his father and grandfather and great-grandfather fed their families off green turtles often.

Maldivian Yellow Fin Tuna Fishing

If sustainability and treading lightly are the goals on this remote island Eco-Centro should go a long way to achieving that end. From the burning of fallen trees and those cleared to make paths, comes charcoal which is used for cooking on the island, saving $50,000 a year previously spent on … charcoal. Compost is turned into bio-gas which, among other things, helps power all those hot showers. Cardboard is composted, glass and coconut husks are shredded (by separate machines) and reused. Bamboo – a great carbon dioxide vacuum – has been planted to offset any carbon put into the blue sky above the island. Alongside the island’s organic gardens and drinking water filtering system, self-sufficiency is getting closer. Now they’ll just have to work on the organic wines. In casks, not bottles.

In the audience for the grand opening were the country’s vice president, a handful of local elected officials, journalists, students from nearby Eydhafushi  and even a few ”spies” – employees from nearby resorts keen on potentially mimicking the  enviro center … which would be the highest form of compliment.

Photo: Fiona Stewart

I’ve been around the world and seen a variety of hoteliers trying very hard to reduce their property’s footprint as well as every bizarre stretch imaginable to claim “eco-resort” status … whatever that term has come to mean. In far too many cases resorts add “eco-resort” to their promotional literature based simply on having placed a card on the side table next to the bed that says if you hang your used towel on the back of the door rather than toss it on the floor, they won’t wash it … thus saving all that hot water and suds. Which is a start. But Sonu, Eva and their teams around the world go so much farther. If every hotelier and resort followed their model, carbon neutrality would quickly become the status quo among resorts of all stars.

Here in the Maldives, Soneva Fushi is nearest to Sonu and Eva’s hearts because it was their first hotel (today their portfolio boasts 26 resorts either open or under development and 41 spas they either own or manage). Sonu – born in London to an Indian family that made a fortune exporting oil and more from Nigeria – leased the jungled island in 1990, in the heart of the Baa atoll. Then in his late 20s, he intended it as a gift for his wife, a former Swedish fashion model.

His idea was to build a kind of Robinson Crusoe escape for the two of them. But … one thing led to another and five years later they opened their first hotel; today the 65-villa island hideaway has made all those lists of both the most luxurious and most green in the world. Which was the goal from the beginning. (Forty percent of their guests are returnees and have been labeled Slow-Lifers: Sustainable – Local – Organic – Wholesome Learning – Inspiring – Fun – Experiences.)

Photo: Fiona Stewart

So … what does qualify as a super-green resort these days? Here it includes a brand new, island-wide recycling eco-center. Air conditioning provided from a unique underwater system that delivers cold water from the depths of the ocean (a $1 million investment that Sonu anticipates will pay for itself in four years.) An organic garden. Recycled … everything, from jute garbage bags to elephant dung paper. A carbon offset program (two percent of every villa rental goes into a fund to offset pollution created by the international flights, float plane and boat rides necessary to get here.) A heat recovery system, which captures heat off the island’s generators for all those long hot showers. Filtered drinking water and sparkling water made on-site. And, by September, the whole operation will be entirely solar.

“We have committed to being completely carbon neutral by the end of next year (2010),” says Sonu, who I first met here in 2005, just weeks just after the tsunami waves raced across the Maldives and through his resort.

The country’s new president is following Soneva Fushi’s example closely. One week ago Mohammed Nasheed committed to making his country the first carbon neutral country in the world by 2020. Among the first persons he called was Sonu. “The minister of tourism and minister of environment have been here many times,” Soneva Fushi’s general manager Philippe Cavory says. “They are all very interested in how we actually do the things we say we’re going to do.”

Cavory points out that most hoteliers would look at Sonu’s way of doing business and scoff at its seemingly high cost, i.e. 400 local employees when 200 could do the job or the experimental air conditioning system that required $1 million up front. “Most people in the hotel business would see that as too much. But the thing about Sonu is that he’s not looking at what’s going to happen ten years from now, he’s looking at 200 years from now. He wants to keep this area clean and growing and he wants to keep the employees happy because he imagines their great-great-grandkids working as waiters here one day.”

Best of all, no luxury sacrificed due to all the green-ness. Sonu is not against fun either; Soneva Fushi boasts the only drive-in theater in the Maldives, though everyone arrives by bicycle rather than car.

Photo: Fiona Stewart

While I admire all of Sonu’s sustainability efforts, what I most admire is the resort’s commitment to the local community. Soneva Fushi recently paid for a new pre-school on the nearby island of Eydhafushi. Each year it hosts week-long Nature Trips bringing one hundred kids from the capital city of Male to the island to teach them about the wildlife here … and often how to swim. “It’s amazing,” says Anke Hofmeister, the resort’s fulltime marine biologist, “that many of these island kids have never learned to swim, nor know anything about their own backyard.”

In June Soneva Fushi – and its sister resort, Soneva Gili, water bungalows located just a 20-minute boat ride from the country’s lone airport in Male –will start promoting what they’re calling a “win-win” program. Come for 14 days and volunteer four days as a teacher, hospital worker, farming assistant or with the resorts’ waste-to-wealth project and they’ll give you fourteen more nights’ accommodation … free.

Photo: Fiona Stewart

Like all Maldivian towns this is laid out in squares. From the start of any street you can stare down it and see blue ocean at the other end. A four-hundred-foot tall, red and white striped telephone tower adorned with a variety of satellite dishes shouts modernity has arrived; the head scarves worn by all women over thirty suggests a powerful connection to centuries-old tradition hangs on. As I walk the streets, obviously an outsider, I stop to chat people up and the responses are friendly, smiling. Everyone I meet – man, woman, child – gives me good, hard handshake as a hello. Though poor, this is not an impoverished place.

Despite the booming tourist business that exists on islands all around, most of these people have little contact with outsiders. Tourists in the Maldives are confined largely by geography to the resort islands. Water surrounds and there aren’t shuttles or ferries or water taxis to take people easily from island to island. During the recently ended thirty-year dictatorship, locals were strongly discouraged from mingling with visitors, concerned that negative influences from the west might rub off. Tourists drink alcohol, run around mostly naked and come to party, after all. By comparison, the local populace does not imbibe and is called to prayer several times a day (though there is reportedly a sizable heroin habit among many of the Maldive’s young people).

Concrete-block-and-cement walls lining the streets are painted in bright orange and purple and faded blue; older walls are made from pieces of coral, a construction now forbidden due to efforts to preserve the fragile reefs. Many of the walls bear stenciled black-and-red “Vote for Saleem” signs, which rather than feel defacing are actually a reminder of a positive thing that’s come to the Maldives in the last few years: Democracy.

I visit with a woman dressed in purple from head to toe; she is bundling reeds for roofs, explaining she is the breadwinner since her husband is sick. Fifty-two, she came here thirty years ago from a nearby, smaller island. In that time, she says, everything has gotten better. The economy. Politics. The way of life, including fifty channels of satellite television. And yes, she worries about rising sea levels, but primarily for her kids. “The seas are climbing … but what can I do?” is the plaint I hear from most here.

On the far side of the island a Woman’s Collective has turned out for a late-afternoon communal sweeping of a corner of the island. Bent at the waist, wearing headscarves and long dresses, they whisk brooms over the sand/dirt ground along the edge of the sea. Paid a small salary by the local government, the clean up is a good thing. But a bad side of island life here is evident just behind where they sweep: Piles of plastic garbage bags, which apparently did not make the once-a-month barge that carries garbage away to a nationwide rubbish-island near Male.

A new port reinforced by thick cement walls has been dredged in the last year, long enough to accommodate thirty to forty fishing boats. It was needed post-tsunami, which turned the local fishing fleet into matchsticks in December 2004. “You ask where the tsunami hit,” responds a 70-year-old man in green polo shirt, faded madras skirt and red Nike flip-flops. “Everywhere. That wave came from every direction at once.” He lucked out when the wave hit, since he was twenty feet up a coconut tree knocking off cocos.

Deeply tanned, his shaved head boasting a thin veneer of graying stubble, he tells me he still fishes when there’s a bit of wind, necessary because his boat has only a sail, no motor. A jack of all island trades, he’s fished, collected coconuts, worked construction and, not so long ago, was paralyzed over half his body due to some unexplained (to him) malady. Today he shows off his good health with the strongest handshake yet.

Photo: Fiona Stewart

During a mile-long swim paralleling the beach we spy an incredibly beautiful and vast variety of wrasses, clown, surgeon and parrot fish. A dusky moray eel peeks out of its coral hideaway. A solitary hawksbill turtle flippers past. And a square-headed porcupine fish attempts to hide itself deep inside a rock crevice. As Anke dives to tickle an anemone hugged tight to the coral, a nasty titan triggerfish nips at her; they can be aggressive little buggers and when they bite literally take a chunk of flesh. The shallow, sandy floor running to the beach is heavy with gray-beige coral, colorful clams and even a few handsome sea cucumbers (black with red dots).

The relative health of the coral is somewhat remarkable because recent history here hasn’t been particularly kind to it. In 1998, thanks to shifting ocean patterns associated with El Niño, sea temperatures rose above 32 degrees C for more than two weeks badly “bleaching” the coral (the killing of the symbiotic algae that lives within the coral and gives it color). Between seventy and ninety percent of all the reefs surrounding the Maldives 26 atolls are estimated to have died as a result. Slowly they are trying to come back.

Photo: Brian Skerry, National Geographic Magazine

While that temperature rise was considered a fluke, today after our swim I ask Anke to guess at the water temps now. “Around 31 degrees C (88 degrees F),” she says, though she not guessing since she’s worked and swum here nearly daily for the past four years.  “For this time of year, that seems to be normal now. In two more months it will be colder, down to 27, 28 degrees.”

In 1998 scientists were astonished that the water temperatures could rise so high, so fast. Now they are worried it may one day become the norm. With approximately 80 per cent of the 1,192 coral islets that make up the island nation just three feet or less above sea level, making it the world’s lowest country, the temperature of the ocean is very important. If the temperatures stay high and the coral continues to suffer and die, there goes another barrier protecting these already fragile, at-risk islands.

While warming and rising seas and coral die-offs are everyday concerns throughout the Maldives, as Anke and I walk back down the beach another environmental worry is evident: Many of the beautiful white sand beaches are narrowing, on some islands quite dramatically. It’s estimated that fifty percent of the inhabited islands and forty five percent of those with resorts only are suffering from some degree of coastal erosion.

Some of the beach loss is due to man. Continued development demands more sand for cement (though much of the sand used for building in the Maldives today comes from Sri Lanka or India). Increased wave action due to more boat traffic takes a toll. But a major blame is placed on the tsunami of 2004, which sucked massive amounts of sand off the beaches, and it never returned.

When you fly above the Maldives it’s easy to see there is no one shape characterizing the outline of the exterior of the atolls or the hundreds of islands sheltered inside them. Strong tides and powerful currents shape each, there is no one pattern thus no single way to reduce or limit the erosion.  On different islands different attempts have been made to save the beaches, including building of seawalls or jetties, dredging and pumping. In some cases it is working, in others not.

On one hand it’s easy to think of these coral atolls and the islands they protect as tough and impervious, imagining that they’ve been here a long time and will be here for a longer time to come. But a short swim and a simple walk on a beautiful, hot, hot day quickly reminds just how fragile, how vulnerable they can be.

Photo: Fiona Stewart

Earlier in the morning, before the day’s heat arrived, I’d walked a nearby jungled island, crows and rails darting among the pandanas and palms, camouflaged lizards and introduced rabbits scooting across the sandy paths. The foliage was dense and green, the island far more substantial than most in the Maldives, which are typically little more than sand and sea rubble piled up on coral. Given that even a substantial island here rises just six feet above sea level, as much as anywhere in the world the Maldives are threatened by rising sea levels.

A fisherman I met early this morning shared what I expect will be a drumbeat of anecdotal reports I hear during the next couple weeks of small islands that used to be habitable at least for day fishermen have already disappeared under rising seas.

It’s been a big week and a big past few months politically and environmentally in the Maldives, thanks largely to last November’s election of Mohammed Nasheed as president.  A human rights activist who had been imprisoned and tortured by the man he ousted, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Nasheed – the first democratically elected president in the nation’s history – has quickly turned into a vocal leader, especially among island nations, on the environmental issues facing his 1,200 island country.

One of his first pronouncements upon election was that he was going to start setting aside money for and start looking at land to buy to move his people, to get them out of harm’s way if sea levels in fact rise as expected. He began diverting a portion of the country’s billion-dollar annual tourist revenue into a new homeland account, an insurance policy against climate change. “It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome,” said Nasheed, also known as Anni.

Yesterday Nasheed was on an atoll near to where I float, assuring its five hundred people that he would at least help them find an island nearby where they could start growing crops. He also assured them he would grow its school to extend to 11th and 12th grades. Just last Sunday, in an op-ed piece written for The Observer, he announced that by 2020 the Maldives would be carbon neutral.

At 41, Nasheed is a rising star in Asia, where he has been compared to Nelson Mandela. Before taking office the new president asked Maldivians to move forward without rancor or retribution – an astonishing call, given that Nasheed had gone to jail 23 times, been tortured and spent 18 months in solitary confinement. The Gayoom “sultanate” was an iron-fisted regime that ran the police, army and courts, and which banned rival parties. Public flogging, banishment to island gulags and torture were routinely used to suppress dissent and the fledging pro-democracy movement. Gayoom was “elected” president six times in 30 years – but never faced an opponent. However, public pressure grew and last year he conceded that democracy was inevitable.

One good thing Gayoom helped implement was a booming, high-end resort economy; as a result the Maldives are the richest country in South Asia, with average incomes reaching $4,600 a year. Corrupt officials, unfortunately, skimmed much of that wealth, off; official figures show almost half of Maldivians earn less than $1 a day.

To make his environmental pledges come to reality, there will have to be sacrifices. To raise cash, his government will sell off state assets, reduce the cabinet and turn the presidential palace into the country’s first university.

“It’s desperate,” the president says. “We are a 100% Islamic country and democracy came from within. Do you want to lose that because we were denied the money to deal with the poverty created by the dictatorship?” Like so many young, out-of-the-good-old-boy leaders taking reins around the world, the Maldives has quickly and forcefully jumped on the bandwagon. It should be fun to watch.

I came to report on the post-tsunami impacts for the New York Times and as I wandered among the homes badly cracked by the wave and saw decades-old garbage dumps swept into the sea by waters that rushed over the islands – which rise less than six feet above sea level – everyone was talking about the possibility of another such incident.  “What can we do to prevent the next wave from taking us all,” was the collective concern. “What if there is a second wave coming?”

Today I’m back for a couple weeks of scouting – we’ll shoot a documentary film here later in the year – and the subject has changed. No one is talking about tsunami waves, but everyone is talking about rising sea levels. Both are obviously legitimate concerns in a place where all of life lives just a couple feet above the sea. Talk is heightened by a variety of recent reports that sea level rise around the globe is now anticipated to come faster, reach higher … and the fact that the Maldives new president, Mohamed Nasheen, is talking louder than any elected official in the world about the need to do anything we can to slow the seas from rising. He obviously has a vested interest.

As I flew into the Maldives, President Nasheen was going public with plans to make the Maldives the first country in the world to go “carbon neutral” by 2010. (He’s in a race of sorts, leaders in Costa Rica, Iceland, Norway, the Netherlands and New Zealand have previously laid claims on the same title.) Leading by example, he hopes to wean his country – tourism is its biggest economy – away from fossil fuels and towards a mix of wind turbines, solar panels and coconut-burning back-up generators. He is not the first president to gamble on an eco-friendly policy to help promote eco-tourism, but his case may be the direst. If sea levels rise as now predicted – three feet by 2100 – his people will soon have to seriously concentrate on finding a new home (Nasheen’s predecessor talked with Australia about moving his people there; Nasheen has suggested he will look into some kind of land-for-fishing-rights swap with India or Pakistan …).

I’ll be moving around the Maldives a bit during these next two weeks, by boat and float plane, and expect to hear more from the people about their hopes and plans for the coming decades. A first sign of life here just feet above sea level: My room came complete with a life jacket … just in case.