(This year, we published many inspiring and amazing stories that made us fall in love with the world – and this is one our favourites. Click here fo

A new island of hope rising from the Indian Ocean - BBC Travel

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2021-08-24 17:00:09

(This year, we published many inspiring and amazing stories that made us fall in love with the world – and this is one our favourites. Click here for the full list).

Scattered across the Arabian Sea, south-west of Sri Lanka and India, the Maldives present the face of a dreamy, tropical idyll to travellers from all over the world, who fly in to savour picture-perfect coral atolls fringed with white sand, luxurious resorts and world-class water sport.

But perhaps no other nation faces an environmental threat quite like the Maldives. Its luxury beach resorts may be world-famous, but with more than 80% of its scattered 1,200 islands less than 1m above sea level, rising oceans threaten its very existence.

“We are one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth and therefore need to adapt,” said the country’s vice president Mohammed Waheed Hassan in a 2010 World Bank report that warned how, at current predicted rates of sea level rise, all of the Maldives’ around 200 natural inhabited islands could be submerged by 2100.

The low-lying Maldives islands are threatened by rising ocean levels due to climate change (Credit: Matteo Colombo/Getty Images)

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