Comment: Climate change a real and imminent threat to the Maldives
05 May 2011, 10:09 AM
John Rankin
Climate change is a very real and imminent threat to the Maldives, the smallest nation in Asia, which lost 20 islands during the 2004 tsunami. Since then, the government has gone strictly carbon neutral in a bid to protect its population from the rising sea.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague has described climate change as “perhaps the 21st century’s biggest foreign policy challenge”.
He has stressed that “a world which is failing to respond to climate change is one in which the values embodied in the United Nations will not be met”.
Indeed, the UN Charter makes clear that a central purpose of that organisation is to “achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character”.
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