Maldives Coastal Characterization

The Noo Raajje program is a partnership between the Government of the Maldives and members of the Blue Prosperity Coalition. The Noo Raajje program is founded on three pillars of work: Marine Spatial Planning (MSP), Blue Economy (BE), and Sustainable Fisheries (SF). The Waitt Institute is a part of the Blue Prosperity Coalition supporting the The Noo Raajje Program in the Maldives.

SIGS is provided support to the Waitt Institute in gathering data on Maldives to support the component “Coastal Characterization - Spatial and Temporal Characterization of Coastal Development and Infrastructure in the Maldives”. The collected data were used on the MSP pillar to manage the ocean resources within the Exclusive Economic Zone of the Maldives. We studied and characterized the spatial and temporal coastal development projects to create a spatial database of coastal development and infrastructure in the Maldives. As part of the work, we manually classified and validated features which describe the coastal development and infrastructure of the Maldives. The geodatabase developed as part of the project contains metadata describing the type, date of installation, and geographic footprint of each feature that describes the coastal development and infrastructure of the Maldives. We also digitized the coastal and marine development information that are in EIA reports which was made available to the project from the Environmental Protection Agency, Maldives.