Reefscapes- A distributed mitigation and development strategy for the Maldives.

The Paris agreement in 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference central aim was to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping global temperature rise below 2°C above pre industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C.

Intergovernmental panel on climate change(IPCC) 1.5°C report has since revealed that limiting to 1.5°C enables greater opportunities for adaptation in the human and ecological systems of small islands ,low lying coastal areas and deltas.

Isolation is the most favorable condition for capturing and measuring the context’s change, which is important to put under observation. The particularity and the importance of being an Island, this is the meaning of islandness.

-Stefania Staniscia,Island

“An island owns considerable evocative abilities and is also a symbol and synthesis of the condition of the mainland, synecdoche island”

Judith Schlansky’s book Atlas of the remote islands
“There are two types of islands, continental and oceanic. Continental islands are a accidental, derived islands. They are separated from a continent. Oceanic islands are originary, essential islands. Some are formed from coral reefs and display a genuine organism. Others emerge from underwater eruptions, bringing to the light of day a movement from the lowest depths. Some rise slowly; some disappear and then retune. Leaving us no time to annex them.”

– Gilles Deleuze, Causes and reasons of the Desert Island.

Reefscapes is a critical analysis of the existing centralized model in the Maldivian archipelago confronting the circumstances that are causing for impending challenges arising from climate change to be addressed as a secondary issue by proposing an adaptive decentralized model with self sufficient strategies.