This dataset contains the underlying data and calculations for a national-level analysis of biomass flows and food-system change in the Maldives. It includes annual Material Flow Analysis results for 1976–2023, covering domestic extraction, imports, exports, physical trade balance, and domestic material consumption, as well as calculations of ultra-processed food consumption and associated energy, free sugar, and sodium estimates for 2015–2023. The dataset supports Jasmine McHugh’s Master of Environmental Studies thesis at the University of Waterloo and an associated manuscript by Jasmine McHugh, Elham Mohammadi, Nadhiya Abdulla, and Simron J. Singh, currently under review at Ecological Economics. Full citations for the thesis, journal manuscript, and publicly available preprint published on July 2, 2026 are provided in the Excel workbook.

This spreadsheet contains data on Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) composition or other waste types (household, plastics) compiled by Jasmine McHugh under the supervision of Dr. Simron Singh (University of Waterloo, Canada) between September and December 2025.

This report highlights key insights from the state-of-art review on the availability, circulation and integrity of critical resources (e.g., food, water, energy, waste, and infrastructure) and associated climate impacts in the Maldives. This country review is the first in a series of three, conducted as part of the RECOVER project, a needs-driven initiative funded by Climate Adaptation and Resilience initiative (CLARE). The project is aimed at addressing climate change adaptation through a multi-risk and multi-sector approach in the Maldives, Mauritius and Fiji. This briefing report provides an overview on Maldives, a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) in the Indian Ocean, its climate and resource-use challenges, and ongoing efforts to address some of these.

The successful design, implementation and management of the institutional arrangements for climate change adaptation are critical components of sustainable development. This is especially true for small island developing states (SIDS), a group of 58 countries spread across three main geographic regions, which are acknowledged as being disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. In many instances, the dynamics of these arrangements in SIDS are poorly understood and documented. This study helps to fill this gap by identifying and analyzing “networks of action situations” through semi-structured interviews with 14 national and international climate change officials and practitioners in four SIDS (Comoros, Maldives, Seychelles, and Singapore) in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans region. We find that there are a few strategic actors involved in multiple, mutually reinforcing and sometimes conflicting arrangements, which are simultaneously being shaped and reshaped at different scales. We also find varying patterns of power, politics and participation that act as both drivers of and barriers to adaptation in these countries. By deconstructing institutional interlinkages and strategic feedback loops, this paper contributes to a broader understanding of the complexities of environmental governance in small jurisdictions.

In recent years, the concept of circular economy has gained increasing attention from both businesses and governments. The African continent has started to adopt circular economy–related policies at national or regional levels, but it is not yet mainstream. Literature on circular economy has mainly focused on developed countries in the global north with limited attention given to the potential of circular economy for developing countries especially in the context of African islands. In this paper, we fill this gap by providing existing baselines regarding CE for 9 African islands and present their existing strategies that could foster the development of a circular economy. Adopting the Ellen MacArthur Foundation diagram and the ReX framework, we use different components of the combined frameworks to situate the various initiatives. We show that African islands have led an array of initiatives especially in waste management and also in regenerating natural resources. However, various challenges remain, such as the lack of national umbrella frameworks that would ensure circularity across actions. Countries with more favourable socio-economic and political contexts such as Reunion Island or Mauritius implement policies relating to a circular economy. However, these countries and others, such as Maldives or Seychelles, also have a high level of material consumption that requires changes from production to consumption stages. Countries with challenging contexts, such as Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Comoros and to a lesser extent Cabo Verde, have less dedicated policies but various dispersed activities such as using renewable energy that could contribute to circularity. Extraction of natural resources in these countries remains an important source of growth that requires a systemic change towards circularity. Embracing a circular economy presents various opportunities to African islands especially considering the blue economy agendas adopted in these islands.

The Maldives, a small island nation, is continuously facing climate changeClimate-Change impacts and adapting to them. One of the risks of climate change in the Maldives is the sea-level rise that threatens the livelihoodsLivelihood of Maldivians. This paper looks at how farmers in the Maldives adapt to changes in climatic conditions by interviewing farmers on three islands: Fuamulaku, Gan, and Fonadhoo. The study employed 24 in-depth interviews with farmers in these islands. Narratives from a few selected farmers are used to highlight the role of social capital and social networks in shaping farmers’ approaches to climate change adaptationClimate change adaptation. The study shows that family interactions, social networks, and available information build the foundation of their social capital. It identifies the need for effective dissemination of scientific information to farmers and demonstrates that strengthening social capital paves the way for improving their adaptive capacityAdaptive capacity.

Low-lying atoll islands are especially threatened by anticipated sea-level rise, and migration is often mentioned as a potential response of these island societies. Further, small island states are developing population, economic and adaptation policies to plan the future. Policies, such as raising of islands or land reclamation, require a long-term vision on populations and migration. However, population and migration systems in small island settings are poorly understood. To address this deficiency requires an approach that considers changing environmental and socio-economic factors and individual migration decision-making. This article introduces the conceptual model of migration and explores migration within one small island nation, the Maldives, as an example. Agent-based simulations of internal migration from 1985?2014 are used as a basis to explore a range of potential demographic futures up to 2050. The simulations consider a set of consistent demographic, environmental, policy and international migration narratives, which describe a range of key uncertainties. The capital island Malé has experienced significant population growth over the last decades, growing from around 67,000 to 153,000 inhabitants from 2000 to 2014, and comprising about 38 percent of the national population in 2014. In all future narratives, which consider possible demographic, governance, environmental and globalization changes, the growth of Malé continues while many other islands are effectively abandoned. The analysis suggests that migration in the Maldives has a strong inertia, and radical change to the environmental and/or socio-economic drivers would be needed for existing trends to change. Findings from this study may have implications for national development and planning for climate change more widely in island nations.

The expense and logistical difficulties of groundwater assessment in geographically dispersed, small landmasses, prevent it from being widely applied in small island developing countries. We propose a survey-based approach for screening groundwater quality using crowd-sourced information. A household-level survey was conducted in 45 selected inhabited islands across 11 atolls of the Maldives. In each island, covering a sample size between 16 and 85 (median 50) households, use of groundwater, the perceived quality and household groundwater treatment methods applied, were surveyed. The respondents perceived groundwater as highly contaminated and non-potable, but due to the lack of alternative water resources, almost all respondents used it for non-potable purposes. Over 84% of the surveyed islands reported varying degrees of elevated salinity. The water quality indicators of odor, color, and debris were seen to be significantly correlated to each other, but salinity did not show such a correlation. Salinity increased with population density and decreased with the area of the island as well as the latitude. Household treatment of groundwater was rare. Due to the ease of deployment, rapidity of assessment, low cost, and good spatial coverage, crowd-sourced water quality screening can be a viable and important approach alongside detailed groundwater investigation studies.

This study assesses the evolution of 104 inhabited and 82 resort islands across the Maldives between 2004-2006 and 2014-2016 and investigates the contribution of human drivers. Using multi-date satellite imagery, we show that 59.1 % of these islands expanded as a result of human intervention, including mainly land reclamation (often associated with harbor development) and the construction of engineering structures. Land reclamation drove island expansion on 93.5 % of inhabited islands, whereas land reclamation and/or the effects of engineered structures (especially groins and breakwaters) were involved in 79.2 % of the resort islands. Almost 52 % of the islands that increased in size experienced growth rates ≥10 %, with 13 inhabited and 6 resort islands exhibiting growth rates ≥50 %. As a result of widespread human intervention, these islands behave very differently from both the documented Pacific islands and the Maldivian islands of Gaafu-Alifu Dhaalu Atoll (most of which are ‘natural’), 15.5 % and 19.5 % of which underwent expansion over the past decades, respectively. Changes on the islands were driven by political-institutional (one-size-fits-all risk reduction policy based on hard engineering in inhabited islands), demographic (population growth) and socioeconomic (developing and securing outer inhabited islands and post-tsunami tourism growth) factors. The Maldivian island model of ‘reclamation-fortification’ has detrimental impacts on the environment while also questioning the future capacity of the Maldives to face a hard path under increasing risks. Results from the Maldives more broadly offer lessons for other island countries and territories by highlighting the importance of distinguishing between inhabited and exploited and natural islands, and accounting for path dependencies, when designing adaptation solutions.

This research seeks to address the extent to which indices of large-scale modes of climate variability (El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD)) can be linked to physical differences in the local mean and extreme rainfall conditions experienced in the Maldives in order to suggest implications for disaster risk reduction (DRR). While some significant differences in precipitation metrics do occur at the local level between different phases of the large-scale modes of climate variability studied, they do not occur for all sites studied. While the constrained availability of historical meteorological data in the region is a limiting factor in this analysis, these findings suggest that with respect to decision-making related to extreme precipitation, ENSO/IOD forecasting may be most helpful on local scales, when supplementing an approach of on-going readiness in which communities are prepared to effectively manage hazards in any phase of the large-scale modes of climate variability studied. These conclusions are based on only precipitation; results may vary for other impacts including changing sea levels and sea surface temperatures.

Given the severity of the 2016 global bleaching event, there are major questions about how quickly reef communities will recover. Here, we explore the ecological and physical structural changes that occurred across five atoll interior reefs in the southern Maldives using data collected at 6 and 12 months post-bleaching. Following initial severe coral mortality, further minor coral mortality had occurred by 12 months post-bleaching, and coral cover is now low (<6%). In contrast, reef rugosity has continued to decline over time, and our observations suggest transitions to rubble-dominated states will occur in the near future. Juvenile coral densities in shallow fore-reef habitats are also exceptionally low (<6 individuals m−2), well below those measured 9–12 months following the 1998 bleaching event, and below recovery thresholds identified on other Indian Ocean reefs. Our findings suggest that the physical structure of these reefs will need to decline further before effective recruitment and recovery can begin.

Maldivian paths for economic development have historically been constrained by the morphology of atoll islands and the availability of material resources. These constraints are most evident when examining the development of Male?, the Maldives? capital and most populous island. Before the 1970s, Male? was a rather typical atoll island, consisting of accumulated rubble and sand with an underlying lagoonal reef (faro) structure. Rising population and standard-of-living expectations in Male? led to accelerated coral mining of Male?s reefs in the 1970s and 80s for both landfill and construction material, extending the island?s land surface across Male?s lagoon and reef flats, close to the edge of its underlying faro. This combination of mining and fill degraded the island?s natural defenses against wave events, resulting in disastrous floods in April 1987 and the fortification of the coastline with seawalls shortly thereafter. The degree of degradation to natural defenses and amount of investment in urban building stock have jointly locked Male? into a ?hard path? for coastal resilience engineering, and both the damage patterns and response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami demonstrate that the Male? model of development and degradation has spread to smaller Maldivian islands. While hard measures have proven successful in preventing further damage, their expense has led to greater interest in ?soft path,? ecosystem-based resilience measures. The degree of local ecosystem damage, combined with high vulnerability to climate change and Male?s continued growth, means that such measures can only be seen as supplements to heavier fortification in the future, including raised (Th. Vilufushi) or artificial islands (Hulhumale?). The intersecting role hydrological stress on Maldivian groundwater has played in Male?s development path is also discussed.

The Maldives has propelled itself to middle-income status despite its geographic constraints and the risks it faces as a small island economy.

Few developing countries possess sufficient indigenous financial and personnel resources to address adequately the predicted impacts of global climate change. In recognition of this fact, the Oceans and Coastal Areas Programme Activity Centre of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1987 established a series of regional teams to examine potential impacts of climate change and sea-level rise on terrestrial and marine ecosystems, on coastal environments, and on the socioeconomic structures of countries throughout the world. Drawing mainly on the work of the South Pacific Task Team, this article provides an overview of interrelated environmental problems and development problems in the Indo-Pacific region and reviews efforts to develop response strategies. The case of the Maldives is highlighted.