ABC News(NEW YORK) The Maldives are well known as a bucket list getaway. Hearing the country's name conjures up images of luxury huts overlooking an aqua blue ocean. But climate change may cross the country off the map completely. The archipelago, which is made up of over 1,100 coral islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is the lowest lying nation in the world. Therefore, sea level rise caused by global climate change is an existential threat to the island nation. At the current rate of global warming, almost 80% of the Maldives could become uninhabitable by 2050, according to multiple reports from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. "Our islands are slowly being inundated by the sea, one by one," Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, the president of the Maldives, told the U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP26, earlier this week. "If we do not reverse this trend, the Maldives will cease to exist by the end of this century." The islands that are home to local Maldi
Colombo, Sri Lanka/Male, Maldives – A United Nations human rights expert has denounced Maldives’s announcement it was considering burials for Sri Lankan Muslims who die of COVID-19, saying such a move “could end up enabling the further marginalisation of Muslim communities in Sri Lanka”.
Wednesday’s statement from Ahmed Shaheed, the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of belief, comes amid intensifying criticism of a government rule in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka that mandated anyone who dies of COVID-19 must be cremated – a practice forbidden in Islam.
Muslims in Sri Lanka have criticised the policy by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government as “discriminatory” and have insisted that burials should take place in their country.