As the highest point in the country is around nine feet, rising sea levels have always posed an existential threat to the Maldives, and people here knew that someday climate change was going to radically alter their lives. But that was something in the future, part of a long and slow process that would take place over decades. And yet, in a single instant, the Indian Ocean had washed half of the Maldives’ economy out to sea. Almost a quarter of the country’s inhabited islands were severely damaged. Ten percent of them were declared uninhabitable. Almost a full third of the population was
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