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Chapter 4

Phuket

The February 2021 conference of AOSIS, the Alliance Of Small Island States, assembled on the lush tropical resort island of Phuket, Thailand. The 44 AOSIS Member States and observers came from every corner of the globe—Singapore to Trinidad & Tobago, Cuba to Papua-New Guinea, and the Republic of Maldives to the Federated States of Micronesia.

Of the AOSIS entities, 39 are Members of the United Nations, comprising almost 28 percent of the developing countries, and 20 percent of the UN’s total membership. Together, AOSIS Member peoples constitute five percent of the world’s population, more than the US or Western Europe—all facing a precarious future.

The peaceful, sunny beach weather that made tourists visiting Phuket happy belied the reality of coming changes in the climate. Increasingly destructive monsoons would threaten Phuket and many parts of the world with unlivable, destructive conditions.

Inside the elegant Casa Blanca Hotel and the modern, efficient Phuket Convention Center, the pervasive mood was anxiety and gloom. The delegates had one immediate focus in mind. They must quickly persuade the incoming American President, Edwardo Gonzalez, formerly a Democratic US Senator from Texas, and the rest of the world’s governments to take aggressive measures to delay and ultimately minimize the sea-level rise that would otherwise inundate their countries, either entirely or in their most heavily inhabited coastal regions.

Many of the delegates had participated in the Paris Accords negotiations, follow-up meetings, and other climate-related forums. They had known Dr. Ilsa Hartquist well, both in person and through her scientific papers, public advocacy, and media presence. They had looked to her for guidance, believing she was both honest in her analysis and insightful in her advice.

Dr. Hartquist understood in terrifying detail as a scientist what they knew firsthand—that the AOSIS Members’ peoples would bear the most immediate and devastating brunt of climate change: rising sea levels inundating their coastal homes, more powerful and frequent typhoons causing destruction and discouraging tourists, ocean acidification decimating their fisheries, and unpredictable weather conditions making their subsistence agriculture increasingly unreliable and inadequate to their needs.

The most low-lying AOSIS States would disappear completely beneath the waves like slowly sinking ships; more would become uninhabitable as a practical matter. Prospects for economic progress and healthy, thriving communities would evaporate. Their citizens, more than 60 million people, would suffer impoverishment and physical dislocation. Whatever their native talents, it was difficult to see how refugees dispersed in other lands would survive economically without their traditional fishing grounds, farmland, and social structures, even if any other government would take them in.

The progressive closing of borders to Syrian refugees and African boat people, and the political backlash against immigration in Europe and the United States since 2015 were ominous. AOSIS government leaders rightly feared that their citizens, mostly dark-skinned and uneducated beyond elementary school, would not be rescued at all.

Dr. Hartquist had addressed several AOSIS Conferences and Work Group meetings, most recently in January 2020. Her presentation reiterated the substance of her 2018 New York Times editorial advocating SRM in the form of a tropospheric veil over the Arctic Ocean. The delegates warmly welcomed her remarks.

Member governments large enough to have their own scientific and technical expertise had independently reviewed her scientific analysis and agreed her projections were fundamentally correct. The excess carbon dioxide would be fatal in the long term, but increased releases of methane from expanded natural gas drilling and HCFCs from air conditioners—both much more powerful atmospheric heat-trapping agents—made the possibility of more immediate disaster much higher than the near-term effects from carbon dioxide. These threats demanded urgent attention, but they were largely neglected compared to the focus on carbon emissions in the plodding deliberations of international climate conferences.

To the AOSIS delegates, Dr. Hartquist’s concern appeared to go beyond a detached scientific interest in climate change. She obviously understood the structure of the island societies and the life of their people. Her frequent media appearances, as more climate-related disasters struck, had made her sympathies clear.

These appearances were typically circumscribed, explaining the scientific realities in abstract terms. But in occasional in-depth interviews, she recalled with fondness growing up in the small fishing village of Ystad, where people’s lives revolved around fishing and farming. Her emotional attachment to their way of life, so like that of the ocean islanders, was profound.

As the delegates exchanged initial greetings, they shared their shock and outrage at the news of Dr. Hartquist’s murder. Their concern over its political impact was enhanced by their personal attachment to her. She had been an engaging and delightful personality at AOSIS gatherings predominantly populated by older male diplomats. She was more than commonly friendly, especially with the younger delegates and AOSIS staff. The many delegates who had enjoyed her company felt a strong personal sense of loss at her premature death.

Rumors had circulated that in some cases her flirtatious manner with others in attendance went further, but diplomatic discretion kept such matters secret. Many delegates were surprised, and some dismayed, by the revelation that she was travelling in disguise on the Royal Asia Explorer and by rumors she had found sexual companions aboard. Nevertheless, they mourned her absence, both professionally and personally. The Conference would be pallid without her lively presence.

The Official Agenda of the 2021 Conference called for a review of progress under the Paris Accords and sharing of their respective steps toward “adaptation and resilience.” The work was preceded by a handful of eulogies in memory of Dr. Hartquist. Some speakers characterized her as a martyr for their cause; others as the victim of a political act by unscrupulous interests conspiring against prompt action on climate issues. Many delegates were visibly moved by the tributes.

Then the Conference turned to business. Charles Christopher, the delegate (and former President) of the Federated States of Micronesia, traced the progress to date under the Paris Accords. Most of the conclusions in his Report were grim:

In response to the US announcement of its intent to withdraw from the Paris Accords, virtually all other governments have vowed to respect their commitments. But signs of widespread backsliding are evident. Despite Dr. Hartquist’s call for immediate action, no concrete geoengineering steps are being considered.

Some states take the cynical view that without US leadership and its financial and technical assistance, a climate change catastrophe is unavoidable. Others are simply following the US “America First” example and putting their peoples’ immediate economic well-being ahead of preventing long-term disaster. A few theocratically dominated regimes would apparently welcome “the end of days,” confident that their God would rescue them.

The most hopeful recent development is that American President Edwardo Gonzalez, who took office just days ago, announced in his Inaugural Address that “climate change is a growing threat that demands immediate attention, and the United States must once again provide leadership in this effort.”

But he is a former Senator from the oil state of Texas. We don’t know what specific action he will propose, or whether he will be able to obtain support for his legislative objectives in Congress. Inevitably, climate change is just one of many urgent matters on the President’s agenda.

The presentation was met with silence, followed by quiet applause. Delegates absorbed the clear deterioration of political will to address climate problems. Pro forma draft resolutions acknowledged the Report, exhorted the Members to redouble their own efforts, and called upon the US and other governments to take prompt action. No one proposed anything more radical than the programs being pursued under the Paris Accords. Many AOSIS delegates felt that the SRM veil concept recommended by Dr. Hartquist was not sufficiently plausible from a political standpoint to warrant a formal AOSIS resolution.

The Members’ presentations of their adaptation and resilience programs were enlightening and sometimes uplifting, but when measured against the predicted disasters, utterly inadequate. Most were uneconomic for widespread application due to their prohibitive cost or were technically appropriate only in response to certain narrow aspects of the threat.

The full Conference recessed for the day. The remainder of the first week was spent in Work Group meetings, debating and adopting draft Resolutions calling for action, and setting up the AOSIS work plan and budget for the coming year. The results of these activities did nothing to dispel the deeply pessimistic feelings of the delegates. The full Conference would reconvene on Monday with the intention of completing its work and adjourning on Thursday.

One delegate, attending his third AOSIS Conference, was particularly dismayed and frustrated by Christopher’s report and the lack of progress. Mohamed Ibrahim, representing the Republic of Maldives, found himself muttering to his bathroom mirror as he awoke the next morning.

He was furious. I can’t believe I’m the only one who really gets it. My country alone has almost a half million people living and working on a collection of atolls whose average elevation is less than two meters. The median elevation is even less. Thousands have already lost their homes and land. An additional two-meter rise in sea level, which would flood only the coastal periphery of most countries, will put almost all our inhabited land permanently under water. Several other states here will also be inundated, compounding the magnitude of the crisis.

He continued to seethe as he dressed in his well-tailored British casual clothes for a day of leisure and informal negotiation.

Why isn’t anyone fighting for an action program to avoid destruction of our peoples’ lives? No one has offered to take in our people. And even if we can go somewhere as refugees, we’ll be without our homes, our land, or our fisheries for economic survival. The disruption of our lives, our culture, our traditions will be devastating.

We’re exactly the ‘drowning man’ that Dr. Hartquist talked about, only in a tropical sea. Yet no one is even trying to throw us a life preserver. If the world community is too disorganized to avert this tragedy for AOSIS states, we need to help ourselves. It’s time to do something!

Ibrahim was relatively new to the world of diplomacy. He was born in 1981 and reared in Fuvahmulah, a town of thirty thousand on a tropical atoll near the southern end of the Maldives chain, just south of the equator. Its closest neighbors are India and Sri Lanka. His father was a construction engineer; his mother a schoolteacher. Their home was unimpressive, a handful of small rooms in a secluded grove near the beach, but it provided a comfortable, stable environment in which the three children could flourish.

From the time he was ten, Ibrahim, the second child, was marked as a superior student with immense potential for leadership. His alert eyes and wiry build communicated the nimbleness of mind and body that allowed him to excel at surfing as well as academic pursuits.

When he finished secondary school, the Maldivian government awarded him funds to study economics and politics in Delhi, then at Cambridge. While in England, he traveled to Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and Rome. He spent six months in Paris, developing a taste for French food and Baroque and Classical chamber music. He could easily have stayed in London or Frankfurt and made himself wealthy as an investment banker. Instead, in 2005, he abandoned this promising option, choosing to honor the implicit obligation that came with his educational subsidies. He accepted an entry-level position in the Maldivian Foreign Ministry and moved to the national capital, Malé.

The moment he announced his intention to return home, his parents began looking for an intelligent, self-sufficient woman who could manage their son’s household and raise his children during the many absences his new position would inevitably entail. They chose Adeela Mansoor from among many eager candidates and arranged the marriage.

Ibrahim first met Adeela, his betrothed, shortly before the wedding. He found her pleasant in appearance and a lively and discerning personality with good practical sense, though only a rudimentary education. He was happy with his parent’s choice. The marriage negotiations culminated in a wedding ceremony in January 2007, followed by a two-day celebration in the traditional Maldivian manner.

Ibrahim vowed to extend Adeela’s education and expand her personal horizons, but life’s other demands quickly intervened. Within a year, Adeela was busy with the arduous chores of recovering from her first pregnancy, managing the household, and rearing their child.

The child was a girl, which satisfied Ibrahim but left his parents and older relatives disappointed. He assured them that the girl was just the first of several children, which would eventually include a boy. When the second child was also a girl, their parents’ concern increased. Adeela knew that to Ibrahim the girls were just as enjoyable and valuable as boys, but she felt the stress of disappointing their families.

In the Foreign Ministry, Ibrahim was a star almost from the first day. His deep knowledge of English, his Indian and British training in philosophy and government, his broad knowledge of the perspectives and problems of Europe, and his pleasant, noncombative, but persistent personality put him in a class by himself compared to his contemporaries.

Overseas as well, his British education, elocution, and sophisticated taste in clothes and manners gained him easy acceptance in diplomatic circles. After the standard three-year tours in the Maldivian embassies in Delhi and Sri Lanka, he began serving as his country’s Delegate to various UN specialized agency conferences. In these forums, the plight of the Maldives could be argued to a larger audience of diplomats from states that were similarly threatened, though not so immediately and drastically, as well as to others less aware of the threat of global warming.

The more he learned about climate change, the deeper his anger and frustration grew. Most of the delegates to these conferences are either inexperienced or mediocre. They have no real influence at home, and many are simply enjoying the good life, traveling to beautiful conference venues, staying in four- and five-star hotels, and eating well. They return home with interesting gossip for their home office managers and colleagues. They have no sense of mission or urgency, and little ability to change policy even if they did.

There were no AOSIS Conference sessions on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, and Ibrahim had no specific plans or obligations. Many delegates spent the weekend enjoying Phuket’s beaches, restaurants, and other pleasures. In between, they used some of their time to draft reports on the meeting activities for the edification of their prime ministers and foreign ministries.

As Ibrahim ate breakfast in his room, he took out his tablet and began struggling to bring an inchoate fantasy to life: designing a strategy to initiate an SRM project— a veil that could give some immediate relief from climate change and save at least some of his people from disaster.

As the scheme unfolded in his mind and took shape in black-and-white on his tablet, his mood alternated between exhilaration and despair. One moment he saw his “plan” as creative, bold, and plausible, the next moment as an armchair fantasy, a science fiction dream that would never survive a conversation with the first person he approached for support.

With the rough outline of his scheme in hand, Ibrahim began scouring the list of AOSIS delegates in search of a few trustworthy allies. He found two who might see the necessity and have the courage to proceed in an unorthodox way. The first was Ambassador Kamla Panday, currently UN Ambassador for Trinidad & Tobago, two low-lying islands at the southern tip of the Caribbean archipelago.

Aside from its undeniable exposure to sea level rise, Tobago had been completely flattened by a hurricane in 2019. Tobago residents were evacuated to Trinidad, which fortunately did not suffer the same level of damage. Without that possibility, thousands of lives might have been lost. As it was, the property damage was enormous. It would require years of investment just to restore the infrastructure and moderate quality of life that had existed for the previous decade.

Panday was a senior diplomat and the son of a diplomat, far more experienced than Ibrahim. He had benefitted from education at Yale University and served in his state’s diplomatic corps all his life. His family’s origins were a mixture of African slaves and South Asian “indentured servants” imported to replace African slaves who rebelled against the backbreaking work on the sugar plantations. His American education had shaped his personality and approach to problems toward practicality and openness, unlike the more formal diplomatic style of most ambassadors.

Still healthy and clearheaded, Panday had nevertheless reached the point where he was comfortable with his present status. He had little expectation of a more demanding or visible leadership role either at home or abroad. His most immediate concern was finding an appropriate husband for his youngest daughter, Nora. He had married children and several grandchildren, but Nora was his favorite. He was determined to ensure a secure future for her.

Ambassador Anarood Doyal of Mauritius was the other possibility. He was also a seasoned diplomat, older than Ibrahim but still young enough to have ambitions and correspondingly, more cautious. Fluent in English, French, and Bhojpuri—all widely spoken in Mauritius—he had earned a first-class diplomat’s education at the University of Tokyo, including Japanese and a solid grounding in Asian political history. He pursued a year of postgraduate studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, learning Chinese and getting a feel for the tensions and disconnects in China’s rapidly evolving society. Then he worked for a few years in the Shanghai office of an American bank, evaluating investment opportunities for its clients and learning how the business world works.

When he applied for a diplomatic position in the Foreign Ministry of Mauritius, he was hired at once. A big man with dramatic facial expressions and a forceful personality to match, he rose quickly through the ranks of Mauritius’ small diplomatic corps, serving as its Delegate to the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), then as a senior staff member in the Mauritius UN Mission, and eventually as Ambassador to the United States. Now he was back in the world of international organizations as Ambassador of Mauritius to the United Nations and to AOSIS. He displayed great style and presence and an excellent sense of the dramatic. He loved the pomp and circumstance of diplomacy. He looked forward to being the center of attention wherever he went.

Doyal loved the challenge of threading the needle to gain consensus on issues large and small. His ambitions grew with his success. He had persuaded a coalition of island and East African states to nominate him for Director-General of UNESCO, and though this effort seemed likely to fail, other similar opportunities would arise. Meanwhile, if the local political winds blew in the right direction, he might become Deputy Foreign Minister, the highest ranking civil servant in the Mauritius Ministry.

Ibrahim hesitated even to approach either of them. Why would either one risk tarnishing his record to pursue this fool’s errand of a project dreamed up overnight by an inexperienced junior diplomat from another tiny island state? They both have little to gain, a lot to lose.

He knew Panday better than Doyal. Panday is a perceptive senior diplomat. He demonstrates a strong concern for future generations, and relatively less concern for his own advancement. Perhaps he would be willing to take a chance with my scheme because it is the right thing to do, despite doubts about its success and a powerful desire to avoid an embarrassing end to his illustrious career.

He would start with Panday. If Panday seemed interested, they could approach Doyal together. Trying to restrain his enthusiasm, Ibrahim slept on the idea overnight. He recognized he would be rolling the dice by talking to Panday. Even to propose his scheme to one of these “old hand” Ambassadors might create a perception of him as an unrealistic dreamer and damage his own career. But he was determined to embark on this perilous enterprise.