Many climate scientists predicted that low-lying island nations like the Maldives — a collection of flat coral islands — would disappear beneath the waves as sea levels rose due to climate change. But they aren’t. Most island nations actually are expanding, notes Joakim Book:
For decades, leaders, media, and the climate commentariat invoked the shrinking islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans as examples of the existential threat that humanity supposedly faces. Climate change comes for all of us, they said, but faster for these low-lying islands, which will literally cease to exist in the face of rising sea levels.
The visually stunning New York Times piece “The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish” by climate reporter Raymond Zhong and photographer Jason Gulley explores the very obvious fact that the low-lying Maldives haven’t vanished [even though they are low-lying] “islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls…
When we investigate… low-lying islands and an endlessly rising sea level, we discover that, actually, most of these islands are rising rather than shrinking—especially if they’re inhabited by significant populations. Humans don’t go gentle into that good night, and neither, it seems, do the coral reefs and atolls on which the Maldives and countless other island nations around the world sit.
The creative, creating, and inventive humans who call these islands home are pretty reluctant to let the ocean waves slowly drag their shores under. When humans act faster than microscopic, gradual shifts in the climate, outcomes from a harsher nature don’t mean certain death.
Thanks to land reclamation, 93.5 percent of inhabited Maldivian islands expanded between 2004–2006 and 2014–2016, some 60 percent of which through human engineering efforts. While the journalists and doomsday-peddlers half a world away were worrying over the disappearing islands, the Maldivians were busy building a new capital city in Hulhumalé. During 20 years of sea level rises, they turned a strip of land barely usable as an airport into a full-fledged city with high-rises, harbors, and city centers.
What must be equally fascinating to readers of this story and members of the green-industrial complex alike, is the discovery that Earth itself assisted the struggling humans.
It started with the scientists Arthur Webb and Paul Kench, whom the New York Times team followed a decade and a half after the 2010 paper in Global and Planetary Change that first alerted many scientists to the nonissue of island shrinking. Comparing aerial photos of the Maldivian islands from midcentury until the early 2000s, it turned out that “the seas had risen an inch or so each decade, yet the waves had kept piling sediment on the islands’ shores, enough to mean that most of them hadn’t changed much in size.” Clearly, the mechanic story of oceans up, islands down was flawed.
Habitable areas are growing in other parts of the Earth, too. The Central Asian country of Uzbekistan is reclaiming desert by planting salt-resistant plants that grow in the toxic desert where the Aral Sea once existed.
Forests are expanding in much of the world. China’s forests have grown by about 234,000 square miles over the last 30 years, an area the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area the size of Cambodia to its woodlands. Costa Rica has 150% more forest than it did in 1987. Recently, carnivorous plants were reintroduced to English wetlands.
The replacement of horses with automobiles restored New England’s forests, which had mostly disappeared by 1910, but now cover much of the region. Today, Vermont is 78% forested, but in 1910, it was mostly un-forested.
Endangered species are making a comeback. In Spain, the Iberian lynx is no longer an endangered species.
Wild horses recently returned to Kazakhstan after an absence of 200 years. These are genuine wild horses, unlike mustangs, which are domesticated horses that went wild. By contrast, domesticated horses are descended from the wild horses in Kazakhstan, since the grassy plains of northern Kazakhstan were the first place on earth where horses were domesticated.
Last year, a baby beaver was born in London, the first beaver birth there in 400 years. And carnivorous plants were reintroduced to English wetlands.
A dog recently discovered a species of mole long thought to be extinct, De Winton’s golden mole. Crocodiles are flourishing in Australia, where they once verged on extinction.
Florida’s manatees have rebounded to their highest number in years. Sea turtles are proliferating, with sea turtle nests tripling in Florida.
An Asian antelope declared extinct in Bangladesh is making a comeback.
