Majlis Speaker Nasheed Lies About Govt Spending on Adaptations to Climate Change

Majlis Speaker Mohamed Nasheed has lied about the how the national budget was being spent.

In a tweet he had posted last night, Speaker Nasheed had written that 50% of the Maldives' USD2.5 billion (MVR 38.5 billion) budget was being spent on adaptations to climate change. Speaker Nasheed's 50% estimate would amount to MVR 19.2 billion.

However, the national budget for this year that had only recently been approved by the Majlis does not allocate an amount close to Speaker Nasheed's estimate towards adaptation to climate change; the real amount is MVR 1.5 billion, which amounts to only 4% of the national budget.

Adaptive measures to climate change would involve protecting areas subject to erosion, building seawalls, and creating awareness.

It is likely that Speaker Nasheed had tweeted that such a large amount of money was being spent on environmental causes to get more funding for such causes from foreign banks and organisations. Many foreign banks provide special grants, bonds, and loans towards environmental causes. Late last year,
the German investment bank, Deutsche Bank, has decided to financially support the Maldives Coral Institute; a nonprofit organisation lead by Speaker Mohamed Nasheed's ; through its Ocean Resilience Philanthropy Fund.

Speaker Nasheed had lied about government spending on an earlier occasion, aswell. In a tweet he had posted in 2020, he had said that 53% of all government revenue in 2021 would have to be spent on repaying debts. He had also claimed that 83% of those repayments would go towards repaying Chinese loans.

His claims had since been discredited.