🌏Hulhumale, Maldives

Location of Maldives and Hulhumale

Location of Hulhumale
The pictures below show the development of Hulhumale over time. What changes do you notice?
 Note that even though much of Hulhumale is complete, the project is still ongoing.
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Excerpt from the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) of Maldives on Hulhumale

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A new island of hope rising from the Indian Ocean

By Norman Miller. Source: BBC Travel, 11th September 2020

The modern island of Hulhumale is taking shape

8km off the north-east coast of Malé island in the
Maldives in direct response to the threat posed by
inexorably rising sea levels.

Scattered across the Arabian Sea, south-west of

Sri Lanka and India, the Maldives present the face
of a dreamy, tropical idyll to travellers from all over
the world, who fly in to savour picture-perfect coral
atolls fringed with white sand, luxurious resorts
and world-class water sport.

We are one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth

But perhaps no other nation faces an environmental threat quite like the Maldives. Its luxury beach resorts may be
world-famous, but with more than 80% of its scattered 1,200 islands less than 1m above sea level, rising oceans
threaten its very existence.

“We are one of the most vulnerable countries on Earth and therefore need to adapt,” said the country’s vice
president Mohammed Waheed Hassan in a 2010 World Bank report that warned how, at current predicted rates of
sea level rise, all of the Maldives’ around 200
natural inhabited islands could be
submerged by 2100.

The low-lying Maldives islands are

threatened by rising ocean levels due to
climate change (Credit: Matteo
Colombo/Getty Images)

But Maldivians are determined to fight back

to preserve their existence. Back in 2008,
then-president Mohamed Nasheed made
global headlines by announcing a plan to
buy land elsewhere so his citizens could
relocate should islands become submerged.
That plan gave way to considering whether it might be best to work with the sea rather than against it, by building
floating urban developments – as has been done in cities like Amsterdam.

Instead, the Maldives turned to a different form of geo-engineering: creating a 21st-Century city, dubbed the “City
of Hope”, on a new, artificial island christened Hulhumalé.

Pre-Covid, curious tourists would visit the new island city as it takes shape around 8km from the capital city of
Malé by hopping on a 20-minute bus from the airport over the bridge. Yet, few who come to the Maldives on short
luxurious breaks will think about the pragmatic social issues Hulhumalé aims to solve. With more than 500,000
inhabitants scattered across the archipelago, delivery of services is one resource-draining logistical nightmare.
Lack of job opportunities is another, driving youth unemployment to more than 15%, according to a 2020 report by
the World Bank.

As well as the long-term threat of submersion, increasing coastal erosion also threatens the 70% of infrastructure
– homes, other buildings and utilities – located within 100m of present shorelines. There’s also worries over
encroaching salty seas tainting precious fresh water sources, plus risks posed by unpredictable natural disasters,
like the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 100 people in the Maldives.

The new, artificial island of Hulhumalé was built

using millions of cubic metres of sand pumped
from the seabed (Credit: Hassan Mohamed)

“After the 2004 tsunami, a programme for

enhancing resiliency through safer islands was
introduced,” explained Areen Ahmed, director of
business development at the Housing
Development Corporation (HDC) that oversees
the City of Hope. “Hulhumalé is being developed
through careful considerations of climate change
in its architecture and communities.”
Ongoing land reclamation using millions of cubic metres of sand pumped from the seabed has raised the new
island more than 2m above sea level, while the island’s growing City of Hope is seen as a vital new settlement to
relieve the overcrowding that currently blights Malé, where more than 130,000 people cram into 1 square mile
(just more than 2.5 sq km).

“Malé is one of the most densely populated cities on Earth,” said Kate Philpot, who worked as a science officer in
the Maldives, researching reef fish for the Korallion Lab marine station, before becoming senior ecologist at
UK-based consultancy Ecology By Design.

Phase one of Hulhumalé’s land reclamation, consisting of 188 hectares, began in 1997 and was completed in
2002. Two years later, the island celebrated the arrival of its first 1,000 residents. Further reclamation of 244
hectares of land was completed in 2015, and by late
2019, more than 50,000 people were living on
Hulhumalé.

The new island will eventually house up to 240,000

people and help reduce overcrowding in Malé
(Credit: Mr Sham'aan Shakir- Shammu)

But ambitions for Hulhumalé are far greater, eventually

envisioned as hosting up to 240,000 people in
well-designed style by the mid-2020s. This vision
includes a diverse mix of quality housing, new
employment opportunities plus open recreational space
three times larger per person than Malé.

According to Ahmed, in contrast to the unplanned and over-crowded nature of Malé, Hulhumalé was designed
with many green urban planning initiatives. “Buildings are oriented north-south to reduce heat gain and improve
thermal comfort. Streets are designed to optimise wind penetration, reducing reliance on air conditioning. And
schools, mosques and neighbourhood parks are within 100-200m walking distance of residential developments,
reducing car use.” Electric buses and bicycle lanes are also part of the new city landscape.

Varied housing needs are also being catered for. “Hulhumalé comprises diverse housing projects: mid-range,
luxury and social housing,” said Ahmed. “Sixty percent of mid-range housing units have to be sold under the
pricing ceiling set by HDC.” Affordable social housing is available for specific groups, including single women and
those affected by displacement and disasters. There has been detailed consultation to ensure housing and the
wider built environment is accessible to those with disabilities.

Enviable digital infrastructure proposals complement green initiatives and social planning, said Ahmed, who
describes Hulhumalé as “Asia’s first 100% gigabit-enabled smart city”, with fast digital access for residents based
on widespread optical fibre technology known as
GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks).

Hulhumalé has been designed with green urban

planning initiatives and sustainability in mind
(Credit: Hassan Mohamed)

“The ultimate benefit of building a Smart City from

scratch is that Hulhumalé will be seen as a city of
resilience – built by the people of Maldives for the
people of the Maldives,” said Professor Hassan Ugail,
a Maldivian computer scientist who is helping to make
Hulhumalé a smart city, alongside his work as director
of the Centre for Visual Computing at the UK’s University of Bradford.
Hulhumalé aims to tick boxes with regard to sustainable urban development too, including drawing around a third
of its energy from solar power and harvesting rainwater to boost water security. Yet isn’t the very act of building an
artificial island something harmful to the environment – especially in a place famed for coral reefs and pristine
white-sand shores?

When Belgian company Dredging International completed the 244-hectare expansion of the island in 2015, the
operation required sucking around six million cubic metres of sand from the surrounding seabed to then transport
and pump onto Hulhumalé.

“Land reclamation work is particularly problematic,” said Dr Holly East from Northumbria University’s Department
of Geography and Environmental Sciences, an expert in coral reef islands with experience conducting research in
the Maldives. “Not only can it destroy coral reefs, but [it] also creates vast plumes of sediment that travel to other
reef platforms. Sediment smother[s] corals and blocks out sunlight, impacting their capacity to feed, grow and
reproduce.”

At current predicted rates of sea level rise,

all of the Maldives’ around 200 natural
inhabited islands could be submerged by
2100 (Credit: Carl Court/Getty Images)

But with its steadily growing population, land

reclamation has become a simple fact of
Maldivian life, with existing coral reefs
providing the obvious foundation. “Efforts have
been made to reduce impacts of the
development of Hulhumalé, including
translocation of some corals,” said Philpot.
“However, it can take a long time for them to
become established elsewhere – and there is often a poor success rate.”

Yet with her years of experience in the Maldives, Philpot is well aware of competing demands. Tourists may come
and go, but local people need land to live on and jobs. She also makes the rather ironic observation that
Hulhumalé is rising in an area that has already, to some extent, been spoiled.

“Construction is likely to be less damaging than elsewhere in the Maldives,” she said. “It seems preferable to
develop an area with relatively high levels of boat traffic and pollution compared to anywhere else within the
Maldives that remains relatively unspoilt.”

In this view, she is backed by the World Bank’s 2020 report, which notes “the Greater Malé Region, particularly in
Hulhumalé, do not have significant natural
habitats – and the coral reefs are mostly
degraded”.

Despite the Maldives’ idyllic reputation, many

local children never get the opportunity to go
snorkelling (Credit: Carl Court/Getty Images)

Waste disposal remains a key issue – both in

terms of construction waste for Hulhumalé, as
well as waste from its growing city of inhabitants.
“Much of the waste has been transported and
stored in the purpose-built island of Thilafushi,”
explained Philpot wryly.
Maldivian authorities counter the idea that this is basically a tropical rubbish dump, albeit rather vaguely. “All
measures to minimise the impact of construction on the environment are monitored by the Environment Protection
Agency (EPA) of the Maldives,” Ahmed told me.

While Hulhumalé is being fashioned primarily to improve the lives of Maldivians, its City of Hope also aims to be a
beacon for a new cohort of tourists interested in more than just lying in a beachside resort bubble. A 2018 World
Finance report, for example, highlights the potential for medical and sports tourism tied into upcoming projects
such as the Maldives’ first multi-specialist hospital, water theme park and yacht marina.

Philpot also hopes the dreams driving Hulhumalé will extend to a greater appreciation of their surroundings by the
next generation of Maldivians. “I taught coral ecology classes to Maldivian children between [the ages of] 14 and
17 – and more than half my class had never put their faces in the water with a snorkel on,” she said. “Their
amazement at what they saw was so exciting – but also sad, that they lived so close to the sea but never got the
opportunity to experience being underwater. Perhaps with more direct education aimed at marine biology there
would be more interest in preserving and protecting the marine ecosystem amongst the young.”

Rather than just building a City of Hope, in other words, the people of the Maldives are taking an island-building
path into the future that could make the Maldives a Nation of Hope.

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Watch the following videos as well:

● Maldives Floating City Project Launch
● Maldives Floating City - MIPIM 60sec version
● Hulhumale Phase 2 | an aerial fly through
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The Maldives is being swallowed by the sea. Can it adapt?

Whether or not the Maldives can survive climate change, the country will never be the same.
BYTRISTAN MCCONNELL, PHOTOGRAPHS BYMARCO ZORZANELLO
PUBLISHED JANUARY 21, 2022
Source: National Geographic

“My most peaceful moments are on the water,” Thoiba Saeedh, an anthropologist, said just before a motorboat
took us skimming across the glassy Indian Ocean towards the tiny island of Felidhoo in the Maldives. The
speedboat carved a wake between sand-fringed, palm-covered islands—some with resort villas lining wooden
jetties—as a pod of dolphins butterflied through the gentle swell and flying fish launched themselves improbably
into the air.

Twenty-five hundred years of maritime living have shaped the culture and identity of the people of the Maldives, a
country of 1,196 low-lying islands arranged into a double chain of 26 coral atolls, so flat they scarcely breach the
horizon.

Outsiders may know the islands for two things: beach holidays, and the likelihood the Maldives may become the
first country on Earth to disappear beneath rising seas. That includes Felidhoo, where Saeedh wanted to show me
a culture and way of life already slipping away.

Now, as the pace of climate change accelerates, this tiny nation is trying to buy time, in hopes that the world’s
leaders will reduce carbon emissions before the Maldives’ inevitable demise. The archipelago has bet its
future—along with a substantial sum from the national purse—on construction of an artificial, elevated island that
could house a majority of the population of nearly 555,000 people. Meanwhile, a Dutch design firm plans to build
5,000 floating homes on pontoons anchored in a lagoon across the capital.

These may seem extreme measures, but these are extreme times for the Maldives. As President Ibrahim
Mohamed Solih told world leaders at last fall’s United Nations climate conference in Scotland: “The difference
between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees (Celsius) is a death sentence for the Maldives.” And that was merely the
latest cry for help. A decade ago, Solih’s predecessor, Mohammed Nasheed, convened a cabinet meeting
underwater in scuba gear and then proposed moving the entire population to Australia for safety.
The shift from island living in places such as Felidhoo to a man-made platform loaded with skyscrapers and
named the City of Hope also carries a warning worth heeding as climate change wreaks increasing havoc on
every continent: We may lose who we are even before we lose where we are. And if the Maldives manages to
survive the changing planet, the question arises:
What will be saved and what will be lost?

Picture (right): This neighbourhood of 16 high

rises, called Hulhumalé Phase II, is built on an
artificial island that was created out of sand
pumped from the sea floor. Residents from
around the Maldives are gradually being
relocated to the high rises to escape the rising
seas

Picture (left): Hahmad is around

30 and comes from Maafushi
island. He previously worked in
the fishing industry, which is in
decline. Fishermen have to go
further out into the ocean to find
fish, a result of overfishing for
many decades.

Picture (right): A snapshot of the

traffic on the main road through
the city of Malé, the capital and
most populous city in the
Maldives. The densely populated
city is a stark contrast to the over
1,100 small coral islands that
make up the country.

Atolls formed from prehistoric volcanoes

A million years before the dinosaurs disappeared, the Indian tectonic plate drifted north, tearing a gash in the
Earth’s crust from which a ridge of volcanic peaks arose. Over time, the peaks eroded to form the coral-encrusted
Maldives’ atolls.
The nation’s entire land area is just 115 square miles sitting in 35,000 square miles of ocean, with few islands
bigger than 300 acres.Threaded together, the land and sea are the fabric of Maldivian identity. The relationship is
one of fundamental fluidity. “When I say land, I include the water,” said Saeedh. “For us, the water isn’t separate
from the land; the ‘land’ is the water and the island as a whole, because that’s where we live.” In other words,
when the ocean makes up more than 99 percent of your country, you’d better love it.

The islands themselves have an ephemeral quality: sandbanks upon living coral, they grow and shrink, rise and
fall, depending upon the ocean currents and sand deposits. (The list of “disappeared islands” of the Maldives is
long.)
Most of the islands—including the capital Malé—stand about 3.5 feet above sea level; climate scientists forecast
they will be inundated by the century’s end. Hulhumalé, the man-made rescue platform, has an elevation of 6.5
feet.

The development was summoned into existence in 1997 by Herculean dredging of millions of tons of sand used
as fill to turn two adjacent shallow lagoons into 1,000 acres (428 hectares) of compacted sand, which is what
passes in these islands as new land.

“Two-thirds of the population can be housed on these two main islands,” said Ismail Shan Rasheed, planning
strategist at the Hulhumalé Development Corporation.

In many ways, Hulhumalé is an urbanist fantasy, like the start of the urban development video game, SimCity.
Parks and apartments, mosques and shops, skateparks and pavements, schools and roads, have all been built in
what feels like a well-ordered seaside town that was connected to Malé in 2018 by a mile-long bridge.

Picture (right): The Sinamalé Bridge, opened in

2018, links the islands of Malé, Hulhulé, and
Hulhumalé. The nearly mile-long bridge was
originally called the China-Maldives Friendship
Bridge due to construction funding from the Chinese
government. It is the first inter-island bridge in the
Maldives.

Pictured below: Maafushi Island is the local waste

dump. People deposit their waste directly on this
site, where they may burn it. Waste management is
one of the main challenge in the Maldives.
Rasheed himself moved to Hulhumalé in 2013, from
a cramped apartment in Malé where his children had

no outside space to play, and where his youngest

child’s asthma was exacerbated by the exhaust
fumes. He sought the public parks, green spaces,
and fresh air of the planned city, Rasheed explained,
gesturing at a scale model of the new development
in which matchbox-sized buildings line wide
boulevards. “From the point we moved onto
Hulhumalé, it was okay for her,” he recalled.

But there is much more to come: phase one, already

feels like a well-ordered seaside town; phase two, is
still a work in progress. Last September, Aishah
Moosa moved into the newest part of Hulhumalé,
where a cluster of 16 24-story tower blocks is
surrounded by dunes of gravel, half-built car parks
and piles of trash.

Each tower is home to multiple islands’ worth of people. Moosa moved from a one-room flat in Malé, which she
shared with her sister and two nephews, into a three-room apartment on the top floor of “H-2.” “There are so many
people living here,” she said.“We don’t know our neighbours.”

It is better here, but not much. “We are living in these towers because we don’t have a choice,” Moosa said. “We
would love to live in the islands, but there’s no education, no hospitals.” Her new home is no substitute for the
communities of island living. But her tiny, marigold colored balcony offers the previously unthinkable—soaring
altitude in a country with next to none. “We’re not used to this high living,” she said, glancing nervously over the
balcony railing.

Pictured right below: Shallow reef systems that are no longer viable living coral reefs are blasted out so tourists
can swim in the ocean close to the beach.

Picture left above: Inga Dehnert, a marine biologist from the University of Milano Bicocca, in Italy, works a coral
nursery, where coral are bred. The project is aimed at improving coral health, which in general is under strain as
the oceans warm.

Picture left: Coral reefs in the Maldives

have been decimated by warming waters,
sand dredging, and blasting them apart
during construction. The islands are
littered with dead coral. Life underwater is
clear blue, without many species to see.

Harmony with nature under assault

Oddly, for a country going under, sea

level rise is a remarkably rare feature of
everyday conversation. Maldivians leave
that to the politicians or activists. As the
Maldives is a staunchly Muslim country,
many say the future is in Allah’s hands.
The ocean also has been considered a
threat, long before the seas began rising;
the 2004 tsunami, for example, killed
about 100 people.

And, contrary to the barefoot Robinson Crusoe image of the Maldives curated by the travel industry, the
permanent population contends with the same urban problems that afflict larger, land-locked nations. Tourism and
the money it brought spurred rapid development of exclusive resorts and explosive growth of Malé. The city
perches on less than a square mile of land, but it is home to 193,000 people–making it one of the most densely
populated cities in the world.

And the hope is that the City of Hope can solve some of the nation’s other ailments by providing better schools
and good jobs in a country where unemployment has reached 15 percent.

“We developed, like boom!” said Fayyaz Ibrahim, a dive shop owner in his mid-fifties, who still remembers the
quiet streets with few cars, when his family moved to the city in 1974 in search of better jobs, schools, and basic
services. As tourism took off, the modern world crept in at a dizzying pace. Centuries of urban development
occurred in decades.

Today, Malé’s narrow streets are a gauntlet of

weaving scooters, its ever-taller buildings pimpled
with air conditioning outlets and girded with
scaffolding, its concrete extending to the water’s
edge. Warehouse-sized diesel generators keep the
electricity running; industrially desalinated water runs
from the taps; trash is loaded onto barges and
dumped on a nearby island; concrete tetrapods, like
giant jackstones, are piled along the breakwater to
hold the sea at bay. Malé, like the coral on which it
stands, is in a state of continual construction.

Pictured left: Hussain Manik, 51, prays at Malé’s Old Friday

Mosque, as well as others. “I try to visit all mosques as each
one is as important,” he says. The Old Friday Mosque is one
of the oldest and most ornate mosques in the city. This and
other local mosques are built from sturdy coral boulders.

Picture right: The Old Friday Mosque is one of the oldest and
most ornate mosques in Malé. Here, a closeup of the Quranic
script on the coral blocks of the mosque.

On remote Felidhoo, island living is fleeting

The 55-mile run south from Malé to Felidhoo weaves between some of the Maldives’ 130 “resort
islands”—privately run and set aside for tourists, where bikinis and alcohol are both acceptable—assorted other
“inhabited islands” where Maldivians live and work, and specks of “uninhabited islands.”

The inhabited islands, said writer, poet, documentarian, and architect Mariyam Isha Azeez, is where the Maldivian
identity resides. “The Maldives is not the resorts, or this city,” she said. “It is the islands.”
Migration between islands has long been commonplace, in search of opportunity, better fishing, trade, a new
home. Islands are abandoned when they become unlivable, and new ones are found. “Sailing from one island to
another is a way of life for Maldivians, and has been so for many centuries,” wrote historian Naseema Mohamed,
describing a seafaring lifestyle “in harmony with the ocean.”

Abdul Shakoor Ibrahim, 72, who was born on the island and worked as a civil servant in Malé, moved back when
he retired to live out his dream of coming home.

Felidhoo, too, is undergoing change—natural and manmade. The rising seas are playing their part, but Ibrahim
also blames construction of the island’s harbour, which placed a solid, immoveable barrier in the sea for blocking
the natural flow of currents and sand that is piling up where it should not be.

These changes concern Saeedh, the anthropologist who brought me to this island. As she swung in a traditional
hanging chair, made of wood and coconut husk fibres, she spoke about all of the upheaval facing her
country—the rising seas, the pace of migration, climate change, urbanisation—with candour and a clear-eyed
vision of the risks ahead. But she also insisted on her fellow citizens’ innate understanding of the impermanence
of where they live.

“You must understand our relationship with the ocean. We coexist with the ocean and its creatures, its dangers
and its anxieties,” she said, explaining how Maldivians are able to live with the threat of erasure. “The idea that an
island will last forever is against nature.”

Further Reading
● https://www.psmsl.org/about_us/news/2013/workshop_2013/posters/SallyBrown_poster_final.pdf
● https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901120313472?dgcid=rss_sd_all
○ Alternative: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jfr3.12567
● https://www.newscientist.com/article/2125198-on-front-line-of-climate-change-as-maldives-fights-rising-sea
s/