Not everyone believes that global temperature is rising or it is bad. Well, for countries like Maldives, it is a matter of existence. It is thought that all the small islands of Maldives will go under water within the next 50-75 years. The only way to stop this disaster is to invest on our environment and try to fight against the rise in global temperature. Now, Richard Tol, senior research officer at Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute, has caused controversy by stating recently that the rich world should not spend too much money for trying to stop the climate change. MinivanNews reported:
”The developed world shouldn’t bother spending money on tackling climate change because people are ‘moving out of (the Maldives) anyway’, an influential scientist said this week.
”The developed world shouldn’t bother spending money on tackling climate change because people are ‘moving out of (the Maldives) anyway’, an influential scientist said this week.
Richard Tol, senior research officer at Ireland’s Economic and Social Research Institute, has recently published a ‘damage estimate’ for the effects of global warming which counsels against taking action in the short-term.
“(My damage estimate) does hide some things that some people will get very upset about,” Tol said. “From an economic perspective small island states are so tiny and people are moving out of there anyway.”
As an example Tol estimated the welfare loss of the Maldives submerging (some time this century) at three times the inhabitants’ annual salaries, in addition to the 100 percent loss of the country’s GDP.”
This is really very funny to me. It shows that Richard Tol does not have very good perception about Maldives and South Asia. Maldives has a population of 300,000 and I wonder which country will be happy to accept such a large number of people. Secondly, even suppose any European or American country agrees to accept such a large number refuges then what about the refuges from other places. If Maldives go down under water, a vast part of Bangladesh will embrace the same fate and parts of India too. Then the number of homeless people may rise to 30 million instead of just 300,000.
I know that leaders of rich countries just provide some lip service when it comes to climate change. It is unfortunate that their scholars now have taken the same route.
Sea level rise is a very serious problem for the Maldives. However, any Maldivian problem, no matter how big, is a small problem at a global scale. Razib Achmed worries about evacuating 300,000 people over the course of half a century. In the 2004 tsunami, that number of people was killed in a day. The Maldives are of course terribly important to the Maldivians, but a bit of perspective does no harm.
Posted by: Richard Tol | October 10, 2006 4:13 AM | Permalink to Comment