Carbon Neutrality: Can A.S.I Moosa beat Pope Benedict XVI?

If there’s any single quality in President Nasheed that differentiates him from the rest of us ordinary folks, it has to be his intrepid and almost uncanny ability to dream big even in the direst circumstances. In relative terms his ambitions to construct 10,000 housing units, build up a reserve of USD 800 million and keeping a market determined rufiyaa exchange rate at Rf 10 for a dollar at the end of his five year term, would rival even the most audacious hopes and dreams of Barack Obama - the name that has already become the epitome of dreams, hopes and ambitions for hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. And our President Nasheed is far from being done with setting goals and ambitious targets. On the environmental front he has a new dream – the target to make Maldives a carbon neutral country within the next 10 years! He has given this seemingly insurmountable challenge to A.S. Moosa (Sappé).

I did a bit of googling on the idea of carbon neutrality and to my utter surprise the task President has assigned to Sappe is in fact far more challenging than I initially thought. To succeed in his assignment, A.S.I Moosa would have to tussle, for the next ten years, with none other than Pope Benedict XVI. Almost a year and a half before President Nasheed set the carbon-neutral goal for our small country, the Vatican announced its plan to become the first carbon neutral state in the world through its climate forest in Hungary. Four other nations - Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Costa Rica, have the same plan.

Carbon neutrality refers to achieving net zero carbon emissions by “balancing a measured amount of carbon released with an equivalent amount sequestered or offset”. Whether this is a feat A.S.I Moosa could possibly perform for our small, acutely resource constrained island nation that the UNDP has identified in its Oil Price Vulnerability Index (OPVI) as the most vulnerable country in the World to oil prices hikes, remains to be seen.

We are yet to know how A.S.I Moosa plans to go about to confront his daunting task. I don’t have any background knowledge to say anything about the issue from an environmental angle. But one thing I know for sure is that a lot of Maldivians are convinced that we need to do something to reduce our precarious dependence on imported fossil fuels. When oil prices hit USD 147 in July last year, I, for one, thought doomsday wasn’t too far away for our small country. With the unprecedented oil price hikes of 2007-2008, we were clearly caught off-guard as no developments plan in the country had factored in oil at the prices prevalent in the world market during that time. We were saved from an oil-price induced bankruptcy only by the dampened demand for oil brought about by the global financial meltdown.

Most Maldivians would presumably agree that despite the presence of high levels of sunlight and vast expanses of ocean which are potential sources of alternative solar and tidal energy for the country, our government under Gayoom did little to tap into these sources of power. This might very well be the approach A.S.I Moosa would take in his bid to beat the Holy See in the race to become the World’s first carbon neutral country.