ENVIRONMENT FRIENDLY INITIATIVE IN THE MALDIVES

Green Governemental Actions in Maldives

Maldives is an island nation of 1200 isles in the Indian Ocean. Last year the World Travel Awards named Maldives as the worlds most romantic destination. Being a fragile environment the Maldives government encourages environment friendly technologies to be used everywhere, especially at resorts. Last year President Mohamed Nasheed announced a carbon neutral plan to make Maldives the first country to go completely carbon neutral by year 2020. After this announcement the country has been commencing various projects to reach this vision. The president palace it self is powered largely by solar power, there are some wind farm projects and solar projects to be started soon, according to government officials. The carbon neutral plan is also supported by private businesses and resorts in the Maldives. Some of the resorts are already internationally recognised for their environment friendliness and protection efforts.

Sixsense Soneva Fushi was one of the first to start its nature friendly tourism. About 20 years back it began with the construction of the resorts. Several trees had to be cut down to build guest rooms the normal way, but Soneva envisioned the importance and decided to leave those trees inside the room. A hole was cut from the roof for each tree and they were left inside the room. This later emerged as a concept as world became more aware on environmental issues. The resort started getting huge fame on the public media locally and internationally. Encouraged by this, the resort owners decided to go even further. They started environment education programmes for locals, especially students and took the initiate of creating public awareness on environment protection. Today Soneva Fushi has gone even further. The resort has an environment protection centre called Eco Centro. The main purpose of this centre is to reduce, recycle, reuse and adopt environment friendly technology in the resort.

The resortís sewage is processed to produce fertilizer to grow bamboo trees on the island, the wood is then used to make furniture. Being a popular tourist resort for high end market it produce lot of other wastes as well. But, eco-centro manages to use most of those wastes.

Empty wine bottles are crushed and mixed with cement, and used for construction. Soft drink canes are compressed and sold to aluminium traders. Left out wooden pieces are processed through a special incinerator to convert to char coal, then used for barbecue. The remains from barbecue serves as bio char and used for fertilizer again.

Information on Maldives resorts can be found on Maldives best or simply though google. Maldives Best also provides Maldives holidays information and travel advice.