Maldives Green Fund — Statutory Tourist Green Tax for Environmental Protection

The Maldives introduced a per-tourist-night "Green Tax" under the Tourism Act, phased in from 2015, applied to every foreign visitor staying at a resort, hotel, guesthouse or safari vessel. In 2019 the Maldives Green Fund (MGF) was formally established as a trust fund under the Public Finance Act (Law No. 3/2006), administered by the Ministry of Finance together with the Ministry of Climate Change, Environment and Energy, to receive and disburse this revenue on environmental protection, waste management, water and sewerage infrastructure and coastal protection across the country's outer atolls.

The tax rate has been raised over time and, since January 2025, stands at USD 12 per tourist per night at resorts, hotels and safari vessels and USD 6 per night at guesthouses; Maldivian nationals and resident-permit holders are exempt. Revenue has scaled with tourism: the Ministry of Finance collected roughly USD 29.75 million in the first half of 2019 alone, and by 2025 annual collections had reached about MVR 2.25 billion (roughly USD 146 million). The fund's year-end balance stood at MVR 1.61 billion at the close of 2024 and MVR 3.59 billion by December 2025, reflecting several years of accumulated, largely unspent revenue.

Disbursed funds have gone toward water and sewerage systems, sanitation infrastructure, regional waste-management facilities and coastal-erosion protection works on inhabited islands — for example December 2024 disbursements covered water/sewerage and sanitation projects together with regional waste facilities. The mechanism is conceptually similar to Palau's statutory tourism levy for protected areas, but operates at a larger fiscal scale given Maldives' tourism volumes.

The clearest weakness, reported consistently by independent Maldivian financial press, is execution: in 2025 the fund collected roughly MVR 2.25 billion but disbursed only about MVR 275.2 million (roughly 12%), and in the first seven months of 2023 it had already collected USD 40.06 million against USD 23.1 million spent. Commentators attribute the gap to bottlenecks in project planning, procurement and implementation capacity rather than to a lack of environmental need — meaning the scheme's revenue-raising mechanism is proven and well-documented, but its actual on-the-ground environmental impact is harder to verify because most collected funds have not yet been spent.

Read more: https://greenfiscalpolicy.org/the-maldives-collects-nearly-30m-as-green-tax-in-six-months/

Read the full analysis: https://greenfiscalpolicy.org/the-maldives-collects-nearly-30m-as-green-tax-in-six-months/