I first heard about Mohamed Nasheed in 2008, when, immediately after taking office as the first-ever democratically elected leader of the Maldives, he decided not just to repair his country’s broken economy and nurture its fragile democracy but also to take up the formidable battle against climate change.

The Maldives is considered among the nations most vulnerable to the rising sea levels and aberrant weather that are a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It is composed of 1,200 tiny islands in the Indian Ocean, where the average elevation is about five feet and where there are no hills. It is likely that the sea will eventually overtake the islands.

After he was inaugurated, Mr. Nasheed declared that the Maldives was looking for a new homeland for its doomed population, and he later pledged that the country would be the first to become carbon neutral. A former journalist and longtime human rights activist, he viewed the struggle against climate change itself as a fight for human rights.

He had been imprisoned and tortured under the regime of the Maldives’s longtime dictator, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, spending months in solitary confinement. Mr. Nasheed went into exile in 2003, and his return and subsequent election as president was nothing short of a miracle.