'We need development': Maldives switches focus from climate threat to mass tourism

The new government plans to relocate residents to larger atolls - leaving small islands ripe for development. It says these super resorts, not solar power, will create the money needed to adapt to climate change

When Mohamed Nasheed, the young, first democratically elected president of the Maldives, said in 2008 that he was seeking to buy a new homeland to save his people from being inundated by rising sea levels, it made the country of 1,200 coral islands the moral leader in the UN climate talks and helped persuade rich countries to act.

This week the Maldives, under new president Abdulla Yameen, apparently changed environmental tack, saying that mass tourism and mega-developments rather than solar power and carbon neutrality would enable it to adapt itself to climate change and give its young population hope for the future.