News Desk
MALE’ — President Dr Mohamed Muizzu announced on Saturday that the government will allocate MVR 7 million annually from the Maldives Green Fund for environmental protection, describing chronic underfunding as the single biggest obstacle to conservation work in the country.
The announcement came in a message marking World Environment Day. President Muizzu said the money would sit outside the standard state budget for the environmental sector, adding to it rather than replacing any existing allocation.
The funds are intended to cover the management of protected areas, environmental research, monitoring of protected sites, and community programmes run with NGOs and school environment clubs.
The president did not specify which protected areas would be prioritised or how the allocation would be administered but framed the decision as a structural fix to a long-standing problem. Without a guaranteed annual budget, he said, the government has struggled to monitor climate change impacts, carry out environmental assessments, and respond to damage driven by rapid development.
President Muizzu also used the occasion to state plainly what scientists and local communities have said for years: that the Maldives is already living with the consequences of climate change. Rising seas, erratic weather and deteriorating coral reefs are not future risks, he said. They are present ones.
The Maldives Green Fund, financed through a fee collected from tourists, was established to direct revenue from the country’s main industry back into its most pressing environmental challenges. How consistently it has been drawn on for conservation purposes has varied over the years.
The MVR 7 million figure amounts to roughly $450,000 at current exchange rates.
