Scientists say much of the Indian ocean archipelago could disappear under rising sea levels by the end of this century, and for the last few years its president Mohamed Nasheed has been waging a high-profile campaign to convince the rest of the world to cut greenhouse gas pollution.

Well, as of today, president Nasheed is president no more.

Nasheed resigned today after weeks of growing protests, capped off by a police mutiny this morning.

Nasheed said he resigned rather than use force to remain in power.

The now-former president was a political prisoner who became the Maldives’ first democratically-elected leader in 2008.  

But economic reforms cost him public support and religious conservatives accused him of being anti-Islamic.

Ultimately pressure against his government boiled over in the last few weeks after Nasheed ordered the arrest of a top judge, whom the president accused of being in the pocket of the political opposition.

Local journalist John James Robinson says the growing turmoil wasn’t surprising.

“Democracy was a very new concept in the country which had had thirty years of autocratic rule,” Robinson says, “so a lot of the concepts such as independent institutions, an independent judiciary, were all very very new.”

Nasheed handed power to the country’s vice president.

An official in Nasheed’s office called today’s events a coup, but the new president says Nasheed merely bowed to the will of the Maldivian people.

The former vice president says he’ll try to form a national unity government to run the country until elections next year.

The Maldives won’t sink before next year, but given the island’s general precariousness, it’s an inopportune moment for a political crisis.

In 2009, members of the Maldives’ cabinet donned scuba gear and used hand signals at an underwater meeting staged to highlight the threat of global warming to the lowest-lying nation on earth.

It’s the lowest lying country in the world with an average elevation of just one and a half meters above sea level. And if global carbon emissions continue unchecked, much of the 1,200 island archipelago could be underwater by the end of this century.

So the Maldives wants to lead by example in hopes that others will follow suit.

Diesel engines drive almost everything in the Maldives, from the ferries that run between the country’s islands to the electric generators that provide power to its 350,000 citizens. This island nation spends 15 percent of its GDP on diesel.

But the government of the Maldives is hoping to change that.

On an island at the southern tip of the Maldives, a metal tower equipped with small wind turbines rises hundreds of feet above the sand.

“This is called a wind resource assessment tower. And it will constantly monitor the direction of the wind, the speed, and all sorts of information is collected,” said Ahmed Zareer, the chairman of the local power company, Southern Utilities, which is trying to determine whether a wind farm makes sense here.

Until now, data on renewable energy resources here has been slim. But research and investment into renewables has been growing since the country’s president declared two years ago that the Maldives would go carbon neutral by the year 2020.

“We’re really really confident. It’s really quite possible,” said President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. He says it’s possible for the Maldives to quickly squeeze carbon-based fuels out of its economy.

The challenge has special resonance here. If world carbon emissions continue at their present pace, much of the country could be lost underwater by the end of the century.

President Nasheed says it’s important for the Maldives to set an example for the rest of the world.

But he says the effort isn’t just about the environment.

“For us this is an economics issue. It’s a financial issue. We are becoming carbon neutral because it is cheaper than fossil fuels,” said Nasheed.

Or, at least Nasheed hopes it will be in the long run. For now, the transition to cleaner energy means investing between roughly $3 and $5 billion.

Utility Chairman Ahmed Zareer says one of the big challenges is dealing with the high upfront cost of switching to renewables.

“When cities, people and countries develop, you have to pay a little bit of a higher price. We’re trying to adjust these prices to be very minimal,” Zareer said.

The effort includes researching which technologies are best for different parts of the country and then deploying them as cheaply as possible. The government is also offering incentives to citizens willing to invest in renewables on their own.

And they’re turning to innovative techniques like crowdsourcing for ideas on how best to deal with some of the country’s energy challenges. They’ve been spurred to do that in part because cost aside, the switch to renewables here will be complicated.

Solar panels can corrode in salty marine environments like this. Space is at a premium on many of the country’s tiny islands. And in most of the country, the wind only blows a few months a year. But the biggest challenge could be domestic politics.

President Nasheed is the Maldives’ first ever democratically elected leader. But much of the country is unhappy with his record so far and anti-government demonstrations are increasingly common.

Many who support the president’s energy goals say his clean energy plan won’t succeed without strong domestic political support. Sonu Shivdasani, is the founder and C.E.O. of Six Senses, a resort company that’s also aiming to make its properties carbon neutral.

“I think initially his promotion has been very global,” said Shivdasani of President Nasheed. “…underwater cabinet meeting that’s shown around the world, and quoted on CNN. So that’s really what he’s been doing so far. But he’ll need the support of every individual Maldivian if we’re going to meet the target.

But shoring up President Nasheed’s political support has sometimes meant making decisions that undercut his energy agenda. Among other things, he’s maintained an energy subsidy that keeps prices down but also reduces the incentive to use less.

And to keep up with current demand for electricity, the president is sticking with a plan inherited from the previous president to build a new diesel-fired power plant.

It’s a difficult balance in a place that’s already on the edge.

The threat from rising sea levels is clear on the island of Guraidhoo, where environment official Mohamed Zahir pointed a group of international visitors towards a patch of eroded shoreline.

“99 percent of the Maldives is reporting to the environment ministry they are having erosion problems,” Zahir told them.

Erosion – always a problem – has gotten much worse in recent years. Residents say water laps closer and closer to their homes each year.

Of course, what happens here in the Maldives will make only a tiny difference in global carbon emissions. Changes in say China or the US – the world’s two biggest emitters would matter a whole lot more.

But President Nasheed says that where he intends to lead the Maldives… the rest of the world will follow.

“We are 99 percent sure that we will be carbon neutral by 2020. And I believe that it’s not just going to be us. The economics will drive other countries also to do the same,” said Nasheed.

In fact, since Mr. Nasheed announced his goal two years ago, other countries – including Norway, Ethiopia and Costa Rica – have set similar goals.

They’re small fish in the climate change picture, but President Nasheed says it’s a start.

In the course of our reporting on carbon neutrality, we visited the island of Thulaadhoo in Baa Atoll. Watch translator Fazail Lutfi’s reflections on what has changed since his first trip there 20 years ago.

Zeroracer on the road (courtesy of Zero Race)

The race began last August and ended today in a Swiss city that we want you to name.It’s a French-speaking city, next to a large lake, and it’s home to the European headquarters of the United Nations. Those are your clues.

Three electric vehicles rolled into Geneva, Switzerland today which makes Geneva the answer to our quiz. Louis Palmer is the organizer of the ‘Zero Emissions Race’.

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Lisa Mullins: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World.  The battlefront in the international effort to slow global climate change is moving now to Durban, South Africa.  That’s where environment ministers are going to be meeting one year from now.  They’ll try to build on a deal that was reached over this past weekend at the latest United Nations climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico. The World’s environment editor, Peter Thomson, is here to tell us where we go from Cancun.  Peter, first tell us how does the landscape look now on addressing climate change, environmentally and politically?

Peter Thomson: Well, environmentally, frankly, doesn’t look a whole lot different than it did going in.  I mean nothing that came out of this meeting in Cancun changes the basic lay of the land.  Climate change is real.  It’s happening fast.  And the world is no closer to committing to reduce the problem. Politically, I think we’re a little close than we were.  I mean this is the most difficult political challenge I think the world has ever faced.  But I think that there were some bridges mended at this meeting, and somewhat significant, if modest, advances made on commitments between countries to actually do things.

Mullins: Okay, and the most pronounced among those even modest accomplishments?

Thomson: Well, basically there were four.  One was an agreement to help preserve tropical forests.  Tropical forests are an extremely important synch of carbon; they absorb a huge amount of carbon from the atmosphere.  They’ve been being chopped down and burned, and that releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere.  So for the first time, these agreements include provisions to pay essentially, tropical forest countries to preserve their forests.  That’s very significant. There were also agreements to build on this fund that was established last year to provide $100 billion from developed countries to developing countries to deal with climate change. And an agreement on technology transfer, helping developing countries obtain and use proprietary technologies in helping fight climate change. And perhaps one of the most significant ones is a deal on monitoring the emissions of all countries, but in particular developing countries like China and India; basically saying this is what we’re doing…you can come in and look at our books and monitor progress on those.

Mullins: Uh-huh, and China and India are pivotal to the continuation or non-continuation of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.  This is the only global treaty that deals with actually cutting greenhouse gas pollution; it expires in just over a year.

Thomson: Yeah, and that was one of the big questions coming into this conference, probably the biggest overriding question.  The Kyoto Protocol is the agreement signed 13 years ago that binds most of the world’s developed countries to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions, but doesn’t require anything of particular of developing countries, including China and India. But it also doesn’t include the United States because the United States never ratified that treaty.  So, basically the Kyoto Protocol only covers about 40% of global emissions.  And there’s been a tremendous amount of talk about what comes next.  How do we come up with a process that is going to include all of the big emitters, so that it really makes a difference?

Mullins: So was there any motion on that?

Thomson: No.  That’s basically how they salvaged this conference was by agreeing not to do anything on that for the time being, and to kick it ahead until next year, which is really the very last moment.  Because the next meeting takes place in December 2011.  The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

Mullins: So where does this leave the Obama administration in the setup now to the next climate change summit in Durban, South Africa?

Thomson: Well, I think it leaves them in a bit stronger position than they were coming into Cancun.  There was a lot of criticism of the U.S. coming out of Copenhagen that they were in large part responsible for the very weak agreement there.  I think that they have managed to take this difficult position in which they’re squeezed between what’s needed internationally, and what’s needed in terms of what the science tells us the problem calls for, and what’s possible domestically, in Washington, to actually accomplish. And they’re trying to thread this needle.  And I think that some of these more modest increments that they’ve made keeps the U.N. process going, keeps them engaged, keeps them involved as players, and sets the stage in Durban for perhaps a more cooperative, collegial approach than was expected coming into Cancun.

Mullins: All right, thank you very much, The World’s environment editor, Peter Thomson, thank you.

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Jonas Gahr Støre (Photo: Harry Wad)

Experts often warn of the financial costs of climate change. But some countries could stand to benefit from the warming of the planet. Melting ice caps in the Arctic could lead to new transportation routes. And that could be lucrative for a country like Norway. Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks to Norway’s foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Støre. Download MP3

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Lisa Mullins: In Cancun, Mexico, today the spirit of compromise at the Global Climate Summit appears to be holding.  Observers are crediting India with easing a deadlock between the United States and China on the big issue of how to monitor greenhouse gas emissions, and progress is being reported on ways to provide money and technology to help poor countries adapt.  After last year’s Devicive Summit in Copenhagen, progress on climate change can’t come too soon for many observers.

Jonas Stoere: It is going to create instability, migration, destruction of livelihoods.  Not in my country, probably, but it’s going to happen mainly in poor countries, and it’s going to disturb and upset weather patterns for decades to come.

Mullins: That is Norway’s Foreign Minister, Jonas Stoere.  Norway’s among the countries that could actually benefit in some ways from the warming of the planet.  Less ice in the Arctic Ocean is already leading to shorter shipping routes.  Minister Jonas Stoere says that that could be lucrative to a country like Norway, because the new route cut down on the cost of moving goods.

Stoere: It can sail from Rotterdam to Yokohama to important ports and save 40% time.  So for part of the maritime industry, this is an interesting scenario.  Not as an all around the year route, but as a route, a few months of the year, simply indicating that infrastructure in the world is changing.  What we will see in this century, that melting ice, while being an illustration of climate change, is also changing transport routes.

Mullins: Now, who owns this sea that we’re talking about?

Stoere: United States, Canada, Denmark with Greenland, Norway, and Russia.  They have in this area, like in any other coastal area, 200 nautical miles of economic [xx].  Then you have the Arctic Ocean in itself, which goes beyond these borders.  Well, then that is regulated by the law of the sea, as is the middle of the Atlantic, or the middle of the Pacific.  If there were to be resources to be found, as it might really happen out at certain depths and at so far away from shores, there’s a special setup for regulation for how you can explore those resources.

Mullins: There is one disagreement, and maybe you can tell us the status of this right now, and that is the jockeying for position among these five countries.  Specifically, Russia took the act, maybe symbolic, maybe not, of a coupe of years ago planting it’s flag, basically saying, ‘You know what, this territory, now that we all have access to it?  It’s ours.’

Stoere: You know, 99 years ago, a Norwegian planted a flag on the South Pole.  Amundson skied all the way to the South Pole and planted his flag.  That did not make the South Pole Norwegian.  If you plant the flag, Russian, or Norwegian, or any other, at 3000 meter depths of the North Pole, doesn’t make it either Russian or Norwegian.

Speaker: I’m curious about this though, because here Norway is a formidable, but very small state, compared to Russia.  When Russia decides to plant its flag, you say that it was nothing more than kind of a token gesture.  Still, I wonder how you, and I think you’re proud of the way your country has dealt with Russia on this, how you did see it, and kind of how you applied your own negotiating skills to dealing with Russia in this.

Stoere: Well, you know, we had this overlapping claim, 175000 square kilometers, where there was a dispute between Norway and Russia on how to draw the line.  We negotiated that we don’t see it for 40 years, and my colleague said [xx] and myself.  We reached agreement on the 27th of April, this year.  It’s not really if you go to the different areas where there are still disagreements.  They are not potential hotspots in my view.  I don’t think you’ll see a conflict around who owns the North Pole as such.

Speaker: There are also environmental concerns in terms of there’s more traffic out there from various countries who are using this as a shipping lane.  There’s also the chance of more collisions, of more spills for instance, and it still, make no mistake for people that don’t know the area, that it is still a very rough and inhospitable place to get, for instance, rescue crews to.

Stoere: You’re right.  You’re absolutely right.  Let me touch on these issues.  What scares me is the vast accidents really come from transport.  That raises the question: how we regulate transport in these areas?  We are negotiating a [xx] code for how sailing routes and regulations will be dealt with in the future.  Then there is search and rescue.  In an enormous area, Norway and Russia have followed a very detailed set of collaboration on how we do search and rescue, sharing information, sharing surveillance, for example.

Mullins: OK.  So it’s shifting seas in so many ways, and there are benefits and there are detriments of many different kinds that your country is going to be dealing with.

Stoere: Yes, but what really makes me concerned is the responsibilities.  Are we dealing with those responsibilities?  Safe to your passage, safe to your sailing, safe to your environment regulations, and my message [?] shares to counter those who are saying.  Here’s the new major conflict developing  using Cold War language to understand what’s happening in the Arctic.  I’m a former officer from the Norwegian Navy.  I know what it is to live next door to the Soviet Union and Russia.  So I don’t forget why we had those instincts, but I also see that modern Russia will approach the Arctic in a way where there are also numerous shared interests that we can explore, and that should be the mission of modern foreign policy.

Mullins: [music] Jonas Gahr Stoere is Norway’s Foreign Minister.  He spoke to us about the new transport routes in the high north caused by the warming of the Arctic Ocean.  This is P. R. I.

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Petermann Glacier in northwestern Greenland (left image July 28; right image August 5)

A massive iceberg broke off Greenland this week. It’s the largest break in Greenland in 50 years, setting off alarm bells among climate watchers. Anchor Jeb Sharp speaks with Dr. Robert Bindschadler, one of NASA’s leading climate scientists, about the break.
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JEB SHARP: The death toll has topped 1,100 today from flooding and landslides in China. The grim milestone comes amid reports of continuing floods in Pakistan, and an unrelenting heat wave in Russia. Scientists say none of this extreme weather can be directly linked to global warming. But they say it all does fit into the models of what a warmer future might look like. Meanwhile there’s another bit of news raising climate-related alarms. The break-off this week of a massive iceberg from Greenland. Robert Bindschadler is a glaciologist with NASA. He says the location of the ice collapse makes it especially troubling.

ROBERT BINDSCHADLER:  This is happening right at the northern tip of Greenland, so what it tells us is that these dramatic events have extended from the southern part of Greenland where we’ve seen them before all the way to the northern limits. So all of the Greenland ice sheet is now involved in this dynamic.

SHARP:  One of the concerns often about these kinds of events is rising sea levels. Is there any reason to think this one iceberg could contribute significantly to rising sea levels?

BINDSCHADLER: It likely will in a fairly small way and the way it will is that before it calved it was part of an ice shelf. A floating ice tongue connected to the ice sheet and because it’s been removed, there’s less resistance to the flow of the ice sheet into the ocean, so as a glaciologist I would expect the glacier to speed up a little bit and that will contribute a modest increase to sea level rise.

SHARP: And in terms of other impacts I think one of the things that really scares people is the idea that this huge chunk of ice could hit ships or oil rigs.

BINDSCHADLER: It doesn’t move too fast, but you don’t want to get in its way. It’s likely to get caught up in the circulation in the Arctic Ocean and move around for many years.

SHARP: How do you think of the future of the arctic when you think about it? If there’s more ice melts and that means more human activity up there in terms of exploration, numbers of boats. Do you have a kind of nightmarish picture of too much stuff all going different directions and one bumping into the next?

BINDSCHADLER: Yes, I would say it’s disturbing to think about what the near-term future is of the arctic because it’s really chaotic up there. So everybody in the world should kind of keep an eye out on how disruptive climate change is to the northern societies because that’s a harbinger of things to come for everybody on the planet.

SHARP: Dr. Robert Bindschadler is a senior fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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KATY CLARK: I’m Katy Clark and this is The World. Wildfires continue to burn in central and western Russia. Economists suggest that the fires could reduce the country’s national output by up to 1%. The smoke and pollution has become unbearable for many in the capital, Moscow. And so, as Jessica Golloher reports, many are getting out of town.

JESSICA GOLLOHER:  Patience is wearing thin as everyone from babyshkas to kids cram onto an already packed express train. Destination, Domodedova Airport. Many of the passengers say they’re headed out of the pea soup like acrid smoke of Moscow for better, cleaner and more breathable air. American Charlotte Turner is one of them. She says she’s ecstatic to be finally headed home to Boston after spending time in what she describes as Smogeddon.

CHARLOTTE TURNER:  It’s like walking through a campfire. Everywhere is just smoky. You can’t see. Before I left, it wasn’t as bad. I came back last night and it’s been just hard to breathe and really terrible. Can’t even see 100 yards. It’s like smoking a pack of cigarettes on the street for four hours.

GOLLOHER: Standing outside the United check-in at Domodedova Airport in a Northwestern Law t-shirt, Derek Linkous looked relieved to be going back to Chicago. He says the Moscow smog ruined his vacation. He even tried to go home early, but everything was booked.

DEREK LINKOUS: There was just nothing to do in Moscow cause you would just – there’s nothing to do. You just sort of sit in your hotel room, maybe run out to the cafe and hope the cafe isn’t too smoggy. But I mean if you’re just going to sit in a hotel room you may as well just go home.

GOLLOHER: Muscovites commonly flee the city during the summer months. They take vacations just like everyone else. But aviation officials say people this season were desperate to leave. More than 100,000 people flew out of Moscow on Sunday. The highest volume so far this year. Travel agents reported package tours to destinations popular with Russians such as Egypt and Turkey were completely sold out. And an online check found that nearly 95% of trains from Moscow to St. Petersburg were completely sold out over the weekend. Lena Ivanova lives in the Moscow region. She says she’d love to get on a plane or take a vacation to get away from the toxic chemicals, but she can’t afford it. So she and her husband have packed up the car instead.

RUSSIAN SPEAKING

GOLLOHER: She says it’s dangerous here. It’s like we’re at war. She says we can’t breathe, we’re really frightened and we’re going to get out of here. Despite Ivanova’s readiness to flee the smoke and toxic fumes, her neighbor Vasiliey Ivanovich says he’s not budging.

RUSSIAN SPEAKING

GOLLOHER:  He says it’s my home. I’m not going anywhere. Where would I go? I’m not scared of anything. I know these firefighters are working around the clock to get these fires under control. I know the fires will stop soon. And with that, Ivanovich turned on his heels and walked into his house, disappearing through a cloud of thick smoke. The government may need more than Ivanovich’s positive approach. Officials have recently acknowledged that they can’t get the blazes under control and President Dmitry Medvedev has accepted aid such as planes and troops from several other countries. Some forecasters predict that the giant cloud of smoke covering the Moscow region won’t abate for at least several days. Making matters worse, temperatures are expected to remain near 100 degrees for at least a week with no rain in sight. For The World, I’m Jessica Golloher in Moscow.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman, this is The World.  Scientists know of serious threats to frog species across the globe.  They’re vanishing from many areas, though the exact cause is in question.  It could be disease or habitat destruction.  Now a study published by the Journal of Science suggests the world’s lizards are in peril because of climate change.  The World’s Science Correspondent, Rhitu Chatterjee has the story.

RHITU CHATTERJEE:  The European common lizard is a slender creature with a brown back and brightly colored belly.  And as its name implies, it’s found across Europe.  In the 1980′s scientists had documented the lizards in many parts of the Pyrenees mountain range in France.  But when ecologist Barry Sinervo of UC Santa Cruz went back to those locations in the 1990′s, he was surprised by what he found.

BARRY SINERVO:  I was in fact shocked.  They were extinct at many locations.

CHATTERJEE: Sinervo couldn’t find an obvious reason why the lizards had vanished from these areas.  The lizards do still live in some parts of the Pyrenees and the sites where they went extinct were pristine; undisturbed by development.  But there was something different about the areas that had lost their lizards.

SINERVO: They were all concentrated in the southern part of the range and at low elevation.

CHATTERJEE: In other words, these were relatively warm areas at the edge of the species range.  Maybe these areas were getting too warm.  Sinervo wondered if these lizards were dying off due to global warming.

SINERVO: So I thought well that’s interesting but it’s not like a global pattern.

CHATTERJEE: Then in 2006 Sinervo went to Mexico.  And he found the same pattern of local extinctions.  Mountain dwelling lizards were disappearing from the warmer edges of their ranges.  But was it really the heat that was killing them off?  Biologist Donald Miles of Ohio University examined that question.  He measured the air temperature of the sites where the lizards had vanished.  And indeed, for part of the year, these places were too hot for the lizards to survive.

DONALD MILES:  The extinct sites were thermally inhospitable so we got the smoking gun.

CHATTERJEE: Miles, Sinervo and their team wondered what these findings meant for lizards worldwide.  They scoured the literature for data on other lizards.  They applied what they had learned in Mexico and combined it with projections of future temperature increases.  And from that they made some predictions.  If nothing is done to curb global warming, nearly a fifth of all lizard species may go extinct by 2080.  Raymond Huey is a herpetologist at the University of Washington.  He calls the new study solid and important.

RAYMOND HUEY:  This is the first major paper to show that extinctions of lizards are not just for the future, but they’re here now.  I don’t think anyone had an appreciation of that on a global scale.

CHATTERJEE: And scientists say that it’s not just the lizards that are in trouble.  The problem is many species live in mountain ranges.  And as the temperature warms, these animals will have to move higher and higher up the mountains to find a more comfortable climate.  And soon, they could be left with nowhere else to go.  Stuart Pimm is a conservation biologist at Duke University.  He says the planet could warm by two degrees Celsius or more in the coming decades and that could cause large scale extinctions.

STUART PIMM:  The very substantial fraction of species around the world, maybe 25%, live within two degrees of their nearest mountain top, and that means those species are going to be in very serious trouble and it’s a very significant fraction of the world’s biodiversity.

CHATTERJEE: For now, these are only projections.  The big unknown is what the world will do to control the emissions that scientists say are already threatening species and entire ecosystems.  For The World, I’m Rhitu Chatterjee.

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DAVID BARON: I’m David Baron, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. The secretary general of the United Nations has begun a review of the way the UN’s climate science panel works. The inter-governmental panel on climate, or IPCC is a collaboration of thousands of scientists from around the globe. It won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for its work. But recently some people have been questioning its credibility. The World’s Katy Clark has more.

KATY CLARK: The IPCC’s massive 2007 report has been hammered by critics in recent months. They’ve seized on a number of small errors to challenge the credibility of the entire agency. In announcing the review yesterday, UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon made it clear he believes that the science behind climate change remains solid.

BAN KI-MOON: The threat posed by climate change is real. Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change. Nor does it diminish the unique importance of the IPCC work.

KATY CLARK: But the secretary general acknowledged a few errors that had undermined public confidence in the IPCC. For instance, the agency failed to pick up a mistake in its estimate of how quickly the Himalayan glaciers are melting. So Ban Ki-Moon is turning to an independent panel to evaluate the IPCCS’s operations in hopes of avoiding such mistakes in the future. IPCC chairman R.K. Pachauri says he welcomes the review.

R.K. PACHAURI: In recent months, we have seen some criticism. We are receptive and sensitive to that, and we are doing something about it.

KATY CLARK: The review will be led by the head of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Robbert Dijkgraaf.

ROBBER DIJKGRAAF: What we have been asked to look at is the general way in which the IPCC works. So it’s processes and procedures, and management structure, the way it deals with peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed literature. How it communicates. So, it’s actually a very broad task. And we also have been asked to see how the approaches towards errors, how they can be avoided. All in all it will be future looking review.

KATY CLARK: That all sounds good to Roger Pielke Junior.

ROGER PIELKE JUNIOR: I guess I’m in the unique position of being one of researchers who publishes in the peer-reviewed literature who has seen his work misrepresented by the IPCC.

KATY CLARK: Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He says the IPCC’s last report came to erroneous conclusions on the links between rising temperatures and the costs of natural disasters. Pielke doesn’t want to speculate why the IPCC didn’t correct its mistake.

ROGER PIELKE JUNIOR: The reasons for the breakdowns in process don’t matter so much as that they’re recognized and changes are made to the policies and procedures of the institution, so they don’t happen again. It’s inevitable that there will be mistakes in a report as massive and as ambitious as the IPCC, but if the institution’s incapable of responding in an effective manner, then institution has some credibility problems.

KATY CLARK: Pielke says he’s cautiously optimistic that the review will address those problems. Oceanographer Katherine Richardson is a climate advisor to the Danish government. She’s also happy that a third party will be reviewing the IPCC’s work. But she harbors no illusions that the review will satisfy people who believe climate change isn’t real.

KATHERINE RICHARDSON: There’s still people saying same thing about evolution. So it would be naïve to believe that this discussion is going to go away simply because we do look at the way IPCC works.

KATY CLARK: The review panel will try to finish its work by August. That would give the IPCC time to implement any recommendations before it begins work on its next report. For The World, this is Katy Clark.

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In Dhaka the best form of transportation is often a bicycle rickshaw.

Grossman: Bangladesh is crowded. It has a population greater than Russia’s crammed into a space the size of Louisiana. And water is never far away here. The nation sits on a broad coastal plain that’s just above sea level. Civil engineer Ainun Nishat says the country’s geography puts the dense population at risk.

Ainun Nishat: “Bangladesh is nature’s laboratory on natural disaster. We have floods, we have droughts, we have heat waves, we have river bank erosion, we have storm surges, we have cyclones. “

Grossman: And global warming will make things worse, he says. Sea level is expected to rise two or three feet this century. To complicate matters, while the sea is rising, the land is sinking. You see Bangladesh sits on a big delta. This land was built up over thousands of years by sediment washing down the region’s major rivers to their mouths at the Bay of Bengal. But those rivers don’t deposit the sediment on land as they used to. They’ve been constrained by earthen embankments that force the sediment, about a billion tons a year, directly to the sea. Geographer Maminul Haque Sarker says without fresh sediment building up on land, the soil is compacting – it’s sinking – and the country is becoming even more vulnerable to sea level rise.

Maminul Haque Sarker: “If you can manage the sediment better — better way, then it can mitigate some of your losses due to climate change.”

Grossman: That’s what some in Bangladesh are now trying to do… manage the sediment better.

Boats of all sizes and shapes are the used for transport and commerce throughout the waterlogged delta.

Grossman: A heavy-set man in pressed pants and a polo shirt is driving his car through the outskirts of Khulna, the third-largest city in Bangladesh. Shafiqul Islam is director of a small college, a former locally-elected official, and founder of the Pani or water-committee, a grassroots farmers’ rights group. He’s riding an a straight road on the crest of a dike along one of thousands of small rivers that criss-cross the delta. The water is murky, rich with soil washed down from the Himalayas.

Shafiqul Islam: “You need to understand, this is the river, and that is the farmland. Now you can see that the river is full of sediment.”

Grossman: The area around the river was once a mangrove forest. And though more than 50 miles from the sea, it’s so low and flat that the tide used to overflow the low banks of natural channels and flood nearly the entire region with mucky water. In the 1960′s, at the behest of the government, international aid organizations began constructing a system of dikes to create permanent river channels and stop the natural flooding. Islam says it was an attempt to protect farmers who grow rice here.

Shafiqul Islam

Shafiqul Islam: “Because in our country we always think that the Western countries’ manners are very good and they are very knowledgeable, they know everything. But we are very poor countries, we don’t have vast knowledge, we don’t have good engineers here and therefore we have to invite engineers from outside.”

Grossman: But channelizing the rivers robbed the surrounding land of fresh soil. In a matter of decades, once-productive rice paddies had sunk so low they could no longer be drained into the river, which is necessary to farm rice. So the paddies became stagnant and infertile. People had no food.

Shafiqul Islam and others proposed a radical idea: cut the dikes, and let silty water flow onto the farmland for a few years to replenish the depleted paddies. Water officials rebuffed their suggestion. So in 1997, a band of frustrated farmers defied the government and did just that – breached the embankment.

Shafiqul Islam: “There were many police and government officials present while we cut the channel. But thousands and thousands of people were there to help us, and we did it.”

Grossman: As an estimated 20,000 farmers watched, a team of men hacked a hole in the dike with shovels.

Shafiqul Islam: “A huge amount of water went to the wetland side with silt. After the high tide is in full, the water remains stagnant for about 15 or 20 minutes, and at this time, the silt is deposited in the wetland.”

Grossman: The plan to save the paddies outside the city of Khulna worked. In three years the land had collected four feet of new silt. Rice flourishes here once again. Government officials now agree that selectively opening dikes for a new dose of sediment is a good idea. They’ve done it themselves in other areas.

Ainun Nishat: “This is something which is working. And we are champion of it.”

Grossman: Civil engineer Ainun Nishat, who has advised Shafiqul Islam, says although the purpose of cutting the dike in 1997 was to improve agriculture, his country could use the same method to raise the level of the land and protect it from the slow advance of the sea.

Ainun Nishat: “We are pushing the government to do it more effectively. We find the government not doing it with the proper enthusiasm it should receive.

Grossman: Bangladesh does plan to breach more embankements. And other low-lying regions are also exploring this idea. Earlier this year the state of Louisiana announced that it will try restoring sinking wetlands by redirecting sediment from the Mississippi River. But Sheikh Nural Ala, an official with Bangladesh’s Water Development Board, says this technique alone won’t save his people from rising seas.

Sheikh Nural Ala

Grossman: A permanent solution, Ala says, will likely involve a mix of techniques – including selective flooding of some areas, and using accumulated sediment to build higher dikes. And a new study says such measures are urgently needed. The study found that most of the world’s major deltas are sinking… and as the sea rises, flooding in these areas could increase 50% this century – putting tens of millions of people at added risk.

For The World, I’m Daniel Grossman, Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Daniel Grossman’s reporting in Bangladesh is part of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s climate change initiative. It was supported by the Kendeda Fund, Alicia Patterson Journalism Foundation, Barbara Smith Fund, Whole Systems Foundation and Abby Rockefeller & Lee Halprin and 7th Generation Incorporated.

Attention is likely to focus on Chinese President Hu Jintao, who is expected to unveil new steps to tackle emissions. The summit in Copenhagen is aimed at approving a global climate change treaty. Negotiators are trying to agree on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol to limit carbon emissions. The World’s Alex Gallafent reports

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