Days after being sworn in as president of the Maldives in November, Mohamed Muizzu declared that his citizens would not run from rising seas.
"I can categorically say that we definitely don't need to buy land or even lease land from any country," Mr Muizzu told reporters, dispelling warnings by experts and former leaders that hundreds of thousands of Maldivians could become climate refugees.
"If we need to increase the area for living or other economic activity, we can do that. We are self-sufficient to look after ourselves."
Area for living is in short supply in the Maldives, a country whose 90,000-square-kilometre territory is 99 per cent ocean.
Almost half the population resides in the capital, Malé, one of the world's most densely populated cities, which occupies an island that can be circumnavigated on foot in 90 minutes.
The average household has 4.7 people – almost twice that of Australia.
The Maldives is also the lowest-lying country in the world, and one of the most vulnerable to rising sea levels.
Projections indicate that the nation's 1,200 islands, which have an average altitude of just 1.5 metres, could in a worst-case climate scenario be completely submerged by the year 2100.
Maldivian governments have long responded to this problem with a seemingly straightforward solution: building more land.
Over the past 40 years, the country has expanded its landmass by about 10 per cent (30 square kilometres), dredging sand from the sea floor and dumping it in shallow lagoons.
This approach has been a point of national pride for leaders and government officials in the Maldives.
In an opinion piece published by The Guardian last month, Mr Muizzu extolled so-called land reclamation projects as "true climate adaptation if ever I saw it", and called for more international funding to help the Maldives shore up its defences against climate impacts.
Those on the ground, however, tell a different story — describing a devastating trend that is riding roughshod over environmental law, destroying the Maldives' natural landscape and damaging local communities to prop up a luxury tourism industry.
'A threatened paradise'
Aishath Azfa, a graduate researcher at the University of Melbourne who grew up in Malé and has more than 15 years experience working in the Maldives' development planning sector, described land scarcity as an "ongoing chronic issue that all governments are struggling to find a solution to".
"In the Maldives, because the land is so scarce, there's really not enough land for people to live decently and have access to housing," Ms Azfa told the ABC.
"When there's no land you create land – but when you create land you are taking loans."
This has put the Maldives in a precarious position.
Within the past six months, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have warned that rising public debt could place the country under severe economic strain.
Ms Azfa pointed out that such economic difficulties are likely to further inflame the Maldives' climate vulnerability, which is so often cited by leaders like Mr Muizzu as a way to unlock funding in the first place.
"Climate change is used as a selling point to access these finances," she said.
"But climate change is just the front they put [up] to make a compelling argument that, 'We are very vulnerable, please give us this money so that we can create a safe island.'
"Are people really benefiting from it? Is it equally distributed? Who are the winners and who are the losers?"
Ms Azfa said "the everyday person is losing".
The winners, according to her and several other Maldivians that the ABC spoke to, are politicians, the social elite, and the contractors and resort developers connected to them.
"We have more tourism resorts than local inhabited islands now," Abdulla Adam, an environmental advocate from the Maldives, told the ABC.
Mr Adam is from Kulhudhuffushi, an island in the country's far north where, between 2017 and 2018, the Maldivian government overrode environmental regulators and buried huge swaths of mangroves to build an airport.
Following the destruction of the mangroves, which act as a natural buffer against waves, tides and erosion, flooding on Kulhudhuffushi became more frequent, according to residents.
As Mr Adam put it: "We haven't seen this intensity in the past."
Elsewhere across the country, reclamation projects are having a range of impacts on the natural landscape, damaging lagoons, fishing grounds and sensitive coral reef ecosystems.
"The environmental cost of these projects is well documented," Patricia Gossman, an associate director for Human Rights Watch's (HRW) Asia division who has worked on the Maldives since 2018, told the ABC.
"It's not that communities don't want some development … but if [these projects are] carried out in a way that ends up harming the fishing communities or other businesses that people depend on, then they're not really to the benefit of the communities."
'City of Hope'
Some development projects have proven more beneficial than others.
In 2004, the government inaugurated Hulhumalé, a 4-square-kilometre artificial island built just north of Malé to relieve acute housing pressures and provide haven from rising seas.
Over the past two decades the project, nicknamed the "City of Hope", has served as an effective catchment area for the growing number of people spilling over from the capital.
According to the latest census data in 2022, it has a population of more than 65,700 people.
It is for this reason that, despite some environmental impact, experts and international bodies have lauded Hulhumalé, with the Global Centre on Adaptation describing it as a "monumental climate adaptation effort [that] raises hope in a threatened paradise".
Many believe most other reclamation projects, however, only threaten that paradise further.
Mr Adam explained that previously land reclamation was only done to create residential opportunities, as with the Hulhumalé project.
Things changed, he said, under president Abdulla Yameen, a close ally of President Muizzu who was jailed in 2019 after it was found he accepted bribes to grant a lease on an islet for tourism development.
Mr Yameen had his jail sentence overturned this year and was released in April.
It was during Mr Yameen's presidency, between 2013 and 2018, that the government started creating new artificial islands for the primary purpose of tourism, Mr Abdulla said — "not for the local inhabitants to live on, but rather for development of new tourist resorts".
"[Now] it's quite large scale," he explained.
The power of tourism
It's an approach that has attracted controversy — not least from the Maldives environmental watchdog, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Ibrahim Naeem, the group's director general, told the Maldives Parliament in 2019 that "reclamation is not something we should ever do".
Mr Naeem clarified that he was not talking about the expansion of inhabited islands where land is scarce, but rather the reclaiming of land to build airports or tourist resorts which he said causes "severe" and "irreversible" environmental damage.
Yet despite ongoing calls for change, sand is still being dredged and islands built for purposes of tourism.
Last month, the Maldives Fund Management Corporation (MFMC) revealed it had initiated a wide-scale tourism project that will dredge and reclaim 16 islands across the Kaafu Atoll, near Malé.
The development, which falls under an initiative aimed at boosting the Maldives' tourism industry, will see 14 private islands established in the lagoon, along with two luxury tourist resorts, at an estimated cost of $US36 million ($55 million).
Such projects signal the continuation of a trend that has long disturbed Mr Adam and other Maldivians, who have seen successive governments neglect systemic issues of housing shortage in favour of short-term financial gains.
"If the government is seriously concerned about lack of space for people to live on, why are we giving all these islands for tourism development?" he said.
Ms Gossman similarly noted that while she was repeatedly told by politicians and officials that land reclamation projects were needed to address the Maldives' housing shortage, "most of it is really dedicated either to tourist facilities or infrastructure that will service tourist facilities".
She explained that HRW's research pointed to a clear conclusion: in the Maldives, tourism trumps environmentalism.
This precedence is manifest in the power and influence of the country's Ministry of Tourism – which, according to one member of a Malé-based environmental organisation HRW spoke to, "supersedes all other ministries, particularly when it comes to issues of land".
In 2015, the tourism ministry seized the EPA's powers to oversee environmental impact and authorise development projects in the tourism industry.
Almost a decade later, Ms Gossman says the tourism industry remains "extremely powerful in the Maldives" and has an "outsized impact over decisions" regarding development.
Underpinning this issue, however, is a cruel irony.
In a country like the Maldives, whose natural landscape is so key to its international appeal, tourism and the environment are fundamentally linked — and Ms Gossman highlighted the short-sightedness of prioritising the former over the latter.
It's an equation, she suggested, that could bear a devastatingly high price for the Maldives.
"When you dredge up the sea floor, fill in a lagoon and pop down a resort … the cost of that is that it's eroding the very basis of the islands, the existence of the islands themselves," she said.
"There is, of course, the existential threat the Maldives faces from sea level rise anyway, [but] this is accelerating it … the more you dredge and reclaim the land, you're going to hasten the demise of many of the islands."
The ABC contacted the Maldives Ministry of National Planning, Housing and Infrastructure, the Ministry of the Environment, Climate Change and Technology, and the Ministry of Tourism, but did not receive a response.
