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A tourist floats in front of huts at a resort island at the Male Atoll
The floating city of the future
There are two ways to protect the planet from climate change: Slow the heating of the planet or adapt to changing climate conditions. There is now a near-universal consensus that the world’s governments must invest in both strategies.
But climate change poses special problems for the Maldives, an archipelago nation of about 520,000 people who are scattered across more than 1,000 islands. Some 80% of Maldivian territory already sits below sea level. In the capital city of Malé, some 200,000 people live in an area of just 8 square kilometers at an average elevation of less than eight feet above sea level.
For people who live in a nation that will slip beneath the waves in the coming decades, the need for creative, innovative approaches to climate adaptation is an increasingly easy sell.
That’s why the Maldives government is now partnering with a Netherlands-based real estate developer to design a floating city, one that can provide homes, schools, hospitals, stores, restaurants, and other necessities of life for 20,000 people in the Indian Ocean.
Construction is already underway and on schedule. We’ll be watching to see if engineers learn new lessons that boost adaptation strategies on an even larger scale in other parts of the world.
A church is pictured during sunset as a heat wave hits Europe in Oisy-le-Verger, France.
Why we need to adapt to a hotter world
World Weather Attribution, an organization of scientists working on climate-related issues, published a report Tuesday on the extreme heat that has plagued the northern hemisphere this summer. The report’s main takeaway: Extreme heat in North America, Europe, and China this year was made more likely thanks to climate change.
Greenhouse gas emissions and other man-made factors are not the only culprits, the report says. The naturally occurring El Niño weather pattern, which occurs when warm waters rise to the surface of the Pacific Ocean, pushing more heat into the air, has also played a role.
The report’s authors claim, however, that their computer models suggest climate change has made the heatwave in North America 2 C (3.6 F) hotter and the heatwave in China 1 C (1.8 F) hotter than if natural causes alone were to blame.
But lost in the debate over how much blame to assign human or natural causes is the fast-emerging reality that political leaders must start thinking more urgently about how best to invest in new technologies and new infrastructure that allow people and economies to adapt to a hotter planet with less predictable weather. In coming years, billions of dollars will be spent to change the way we live, work, and survive in a world of hotter temps and extreme weather events.
We’ve only just begun to consider the political, economic, social, and human implications of that.