Abstract
Sitting atop an oceanic ridge running from the Lakshadweep Islands to the north to the Chagos Islands to the south, the Republic of Maldives dots the periphery of 26 atolls in the Indian Ocean. It has a total land area of 298 km2 (115 mi2) but the Republic as an archipelago encompasses 90,000 km2 of ocean surface. The Maldives 1192 islands are low-lying and small and face environmental risks due to geophysical hazards, water availability, disease, and food insecurity. The dispersed population of 350,000, as well as the livelihoods of expatriate workers, are highly vulnerable to climate variability. They are also affected by El Niño impacts, which tend to be modulated by the influences of other air-sea interactions such as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). The impacts of El Niño are also influenced by an ever-warming Indian Ocean as well as by atmospheric waves. In this chapter, the variation of indices for these influences are compared in order to extrapolate the impacts of climate change from mid-2014 to mid-2016. This study concludes that some of these impacts—including coral bleaching, drought (in the northern islands), flooding (in some seasons), infectious disease, and fishery and agriculture loss—are due to the very strong El Niño that formed in 2015.
Keywords
- El Nino
- Climate
- Maldives
- Arabian Sea
- Indian Ocean
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Zubair, L., Nijamdeen, A. (2022). The Maldives. In: Glantz, M.H. (eds) El Niño Ready Nations and Disaster Risk Reduction. Disaster Studies and Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86503-0_3
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