MALÉ, Maldives — To live in the Maldives is to live in one of two worlds. Either you belong to the capital — Malé, a micro-Manhattan in the Indian Ocean — or you are out in “the islands,” among the quietest and most remote villages this side of the Arctic tundra.

It is in these places — far from the archipelago’s walled-garden resort atolls, where no Maldivians actually dwell — that the country is picking between two visions of its future, like much of the rest of Asia, but more so.

The outer islands are steadily depopulating, as the appeal of making a life through tuna fishing and coconut farming along their crushed-coral seashores shrinks. The splendid isolation may be what attracts visitors, but it seems incompatible with islanders’ aspirations in a nation modernized by global tourism.

Passengers take the ferry from Malé, the capital of the Maldives, to the nearby island of Villingili on Jan 22, 2024. 

As Maldivians give up on island life, the government feels compelled to keep building up Malé, the country’s one real city. But Malé is pressed up hard against the limits of human habitation. By some measures, it is the most densely populated island on Earth, with over a third of the country’s 520,000 people on a landmass that can be crossed by foot in about 20 minutes.

If more Maldivians are going to move there, its physical structure will need to be radically reworked. In the meantime, it is sprawling outward wherever it can: The government is surrounding Malé with sea bridges to artificial islands packed with housing projects financed by China and India.

On Jan. 22, President Mohamed Muizzu announced his otherworldly vision for an undersea tunnel between Malé proper and a land reclamation project where Chinese investors will help build 65,000 housing units on what is now barely a sandbar.

Muizzu, a civil engineer by training, said the tunnel would “provide beautiful views of the sea” as commuters passed through it. (Feasibility to be determined.)

Humay Ghafoor, a researcher who campaigns against environmental degradation, said that “nobody does any assessments” before commissioning “massive infrastructure” projects. This allows an airport, for instance, to be built over a mangrove, destroying a whole island’s freshwater supply.

The Maldives encompasses a thousand islands stretched along a 550-mile axis, each one a bit of exposed coral that grew from the rims of a prehistoric range of undersea volcanoes. These form rings called atolls — a word that comes to English from the native Dhivehi language. Most of the 188 inhabited islands have fewer than 1,000 residents.

The resorts — those airy villas floating over turquoise seas — are all on technically “uninhabited” islands. The guests are foreign, and most of the staff too, mainly from India and Bangladesh. In some ways, the resorts are like offshore oil rigs, pumping out nearly all of the country’s income. By design, they are divorced from Maldivian culture and abstracted from their South Asian location.

The typical inhabited island is likewise rich in sunshine and warmth and has access to a shallow lagoon, palm trees and maybe a mangrove forest. The inhabitants are highly literate, many are English-speaking and they are connected to the rest of the world by the internet, mobile data and long ferry routes.

Their traditions survive, still. Perhaps every island except Malé has a holhuashi, a covered seating platform at its harbor, sometimes circled by hanging woven chairs. Men gather to rest at midday and exchange gossip.

There is little doubt that climate change will eventually bring doom to this country, most of which is just a meter or two above sea level. But that catastrophe is thought to be a century or more away.

Instead, Maldivians are leaving the islands for the sake of their children, looking to Malé and the world beyond. When it comes to education and health care, there is no substitute for city life.

Nolhivaranfaru, a fishhook-shaped bit of powdery white sand, with a green and fertile core between its beaches, is like many of the Maldives’ inhabited islands. Flowering frangipani stand over an Islamic cemetery near its piers, around a centuries-old shrine to an Arab pilgrim. It takes 25 minutes by speedboat to reach the nearest landmass, and two airplanes from there to get to neighboring India.

That is a journey that Maryam Asima, a 30-year-old mother of twins, made at great cost and personal hardship. She and her husband, the captain of a tourist yacht that docks 175 miles away, near Malé, had been unable to conceive. Two years ago, Asima and her sister, who was in a similar position, traveled to Kochi, India, a city of 2.1 million, where they made do on their own during 11 months of IVF treatment.

Health care remains rudimentary even on the better connected of the outer islands. Staff members at the local clinic scoff at the idea of someday providing IVF. They say quietly that even most emergency care is beyond them: Any patient who needs a ventilator must be flown hundreds of miles away.

Asima, now back on the island with her 6-month-old twins, says she is satisfied with the results of her ordeal. Her sister has given her a nephew, too. With her encouragement, two other women from the island have become pregnant in the same way. The government has started offering $500 subsidies and the possibility of free air travel for families that need to go abroad for IVF.

She likes the “home feeling” of her island and hopes to send her children to school there, even if they need to travel to a nearby island to see a pediatrician. But this is not her first home: Asima was born on an even smaller island, Maavaidhoo, which was abandoned after being swamped by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.

Many Maldivians have been on the move for a generation or more, leaving smaller communities for larger ones. More than anywhere else, those who can afford it go to Malé.

Thirty years ago, it was not unusual for families to send unaccompanied minors on long ferry journeys, of 20 hours or more, to live in Malé. They would stay with distant relatives or even strangers and work as pint-size housekeepers to pay for their room and board as they attended one of the country’s better schools.

Island families still send their children to study in Malé, but usually now they travel as teenagers; better primary schooling is available even in remote places.

The cramped conditions of the capital are the first challenge they face. A compact grid of streets jams pedestrians, motorbikes, workshops and luxury perfumers together like a miniature version of central Hong Kong. One-bedroom apartments rent for five times the starting salary of a government office worker.

Ajuvad, a nervous, soft-spoken 23-year-old, came to Malé at 16 to join his older siblings, six people crammed into three bedrooms. They are all professionals, with jobs as teachers and technicians. But they were raised in another world, a 36-hour ferry ride away. There, the beach was a five-minute walk away with no roads and no motorbikes, and their home was a four-bedroom house that their father, a fisherman, built himself. Their mother made fish paste and sold it to neighbors.

Ajuvad remembers the transition as being “quite a challenge.” Having to live without his parents, and without an inch of space to study alone in quiet, he said, “I thought my world had collapsed.”

Ahmed Abbas, a 39-year-old hardware salesperson, had an easier time moving into Malé’s urban sprawl from a distant southern island 12 years ago. His family of six shares a two-bedroom apartment in a complex built by Chinese developers, across a sea bridge from the city proper. They spend only half of their income on rent, and he drives to the city, 25 minutes each way, twice a day.

Abbas studied and worked around South India for many years before settling down. He has seen enough of the world to appreciate his family’s perch, which they share with two love birds: Small, exotic pets are a big business in little Malé.

But he still misses the island life. Back home, it was “nice because the people are nice,” he said, “normal country people, all smiling.”

Coral reefs are vital to the Maldives. This is how travelers can help restore them.

The coral fragment from the seafloor off the coast of the resort Siyam World Maldives in the Noonu Atoll had a stark contrast. One inch of the coral’s light brown tips was bumpy with living polyps, while the rest was dull white, resembling a dead tree branch.

This coral species, known as acropora hemprichii, grows in the shallow reefs of the Maldives in tapered branches which eventually look like a bush or dome as they grow.

That piece of coral I spotted broke off from its home likely due to a powerful wave or a careless snorkeler. Once it fell into the sand, it began to die off. To the untrained eye, it seemed like there was no hope for that little coral fragment.

However, that fragment was far from dead, and the solution to reviving it was simple.

Coral planting is a simple act of fastening a coral fragment to a metal frame and placing it in a safe, shallow area of the ocean. In mere months, the coral has the potential to flourish once again. As the corals regenerate, the reef becomes more habitable for fish, that swim through and make the frames part of their home. Over 25% of the world’s fish inhabit and get their food from coral reefs.

As climate change and human activity continue to threaten coral reefs, tropical destinations such as the Maldives are turning to coral restoration initiatives, such as coral planting, to save the ocean, which they heavily rely on for tourism and the local way of life.

 

Resort guests are encouraged to get involved and protect the very ocean that drew them to the Maldives in the first place – and the call is being answered. According to Booking.com’s Sustainable Travel Report 2023, two-thirds of its 33,000 survey respondents said they “want to leave the places they visit better than when they arrived.”

“Ninety-nine percent of people come to the Maldives for the ocean because they want to snorkel,” said Mariyam “Thuhu” Thuhufa, marine biologist at Siyam World Maldives, which offersoffers marine conservation activities for guests including coral planting and lagoon clean ups. “A lot of them do get very curious, a lot of them are keen to understand what they can see and how they can help.”

No one went to the Maldive 50 years ago: Now it's one of the hottest destinations.

How important are coral reefs to the Maldives?

The Maldives is an archipelago made up of over 1,000 islands sitting mere feet above sea level, which means the country is 99% ocean. And that’s where most of the natural diversity exists, from manta rays in the north to hammerhead sharks in the south.

“Without the ocean, the Maldives just can’t exist,” said Thuhufa.

All Maldivians depend on the ocean in some way, 71% rely on it for their primary source of income. Maldivians get their food from line fishing at coral reefs, such as snapper or emperor fish. Fishing for big game fish like tuna is also the second largest industry, following tourism.

Without healthy coral reefs, the islands wouldn’t even exist. “If you go to a local island, you’ll see a lot of the houses are built very close to the ocean, right next to the beach,” said Thuhufa. During monsoon season, from May to November, big swells wash away the beaches, but a healthy reef can break the wave energy before it reaches the island, she said.

The fate of coral reefs are in resorts’ hands

 

To Thuhufa, coral bleaching is one of the most pressing issues for the islands and “something the whole world is experiencing.” The last mass bleaching event, which occurred between 2014 and 2017, saw 15% of the world’s reefs die off. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts a fourth, even worse mass bleaching this year.

"It's looking like the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere is probably going to bleach this year," said ecologist Derek Manzello, the coordinator of NOAA's Coral Reef Watch which serves as the global monitoring authority on coral bleaching risk.

“We are literally sitting on the cusp of the worst bleaching event in the history of the planet,” he said. Up to 90% of the world’s corals could be lost.

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Thuhufa recalled an uninhabited island she visited for volunteer research work in high school. “The reef was so beautiful with so many vibrant colors,” she said. After the 2016 bleaching, she returned to the island to see how it was affected. “It was the most devastating thing I’ve seen,” she said. “Everything was bleached, everything was covered in algae.”

With tourism as the country’s biggest industry, resorts play a vital role in the protection of coral reefs.

Although construction and increased human activity can damage the fragile eco-systems of reefs, many resorts in the Maldives are working to protect their house reefs by hiring in-house marine biologists and creating nurseries for coral planting. New resorts in the Maldives need to undergo an impact assessment before they can break ground (or sand in their case).

A 2018 study analyzing the direct impact of seven luxury Maldivian resorts on coral reef health found that the amount of live coral and the size of colonies increased over time if the resort had conservation initiatives in place.

“Your reef is protected in the sense that there’s no fishing, and guests are told not to touch corals,” Thuhufa said. “A lot more is put into the reefs to keep them healthy.”

However, the study also revealed that resorts with poor management practices and more sedimentation and runoff can harm the reefs.

What is it like to plant coral?

 

I tried coral planting for the first time during my stay at Siyam World Maldives, and it was surprisingly easy and engaging.

Guests can book the experience via the resort app, which they download during check-in, or their resort ambassador can arrange it for them.

Coral planting is an emerging type of coral restoration, and since it’s only been done on a small scale, it doesn’t tackle the root of the problem of coral bleaching or warming temperatures. It can, however, help make a specific reef a bit more habitable and spread awareness of the condition of coral reefs.

The marine biology team met me on the beach with a hexagon-shaped metal frame and two containers filled with coral fragments they found. One by one, we attached the coral pieces to the frame using zip ties, ensuring they were flush with the metal. This way, the coral will merge and regrow over the frame.

 

We splashed water on the corals every half hour to ensure they didn’t dry out during the process. When the frame was finished, we placed it in a shallow snorkeling area to join over 100 other coral frames. The marine biology team checked on the frames and removed any algae so the coral could breathe. The frames come in shapes like hearts or rays but remain rather open for fish to swim through them.

Although coral is sensitive, it’s also a resilient animal – yes, corals are technically considered tiny animals since, unlike plants, they don’t make their own food. Sometimes as small as a pencil tip, polyps make up the coral structure we see and attach to rocks, the seabed or, in this case, a metal frame.

Depending on the species of coral – and there are hundreds – the coral can take around five months to attach to the frame and then a few more months to regrow, according to Thuhufa.

As I dove underwater to explore the coral nursery, I noticed batfish, triggerfish and other colorful reef fish seamlessly swimming between anemones and among the coral frames.