Will Climate Change Force Our Children to Live in Giant Floating Cities?
The UN and South Korea are building OCEANIX Busan— the first city on the ocean
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Unless you choose to live under a rock — physically or mentally — the negative effects of climate change have become impossible to ignore.
Whether you want to believe that rising temperatures are a natural phenomenon or understand that they’re the result of humanity’s wasteful use of resources. The results are the same.
The atmosphere is warming, the poles are melting, and sea levels are rising.
A conservative scientific consensus states that a 1.5°C increase in global temperature by 2100 will result in a global sea-level rise of 0.83 to 2.52 feet.
Living along the coast is becoming dangerous.
We know that rising sea levels will lead to the displacement of thousands of people. The oceans will destroy homes, businesses, and critical infrastructure.
Rising sea levels increase the risk of saltwater intrusion into the surface and into our groundwater supplies. They’ll contaminate drinking water sources, making it impossible to access clean water or grow crops on the salty soil.
Many smaller coastal communities have already lost their land and homes.
However, 2 in 5 people worldwide live within 100 kilometers of the coast. 90 percent of the world’s megacities are at risk from rising sea levels.
The social and economic impacts will be significant and everyone will feel the consequences, regardless of location.
Scientists agree that sea levels will continue to rise and that these effects will be widespread.
While they disagree on how fast and how high the oceans will rise, they agree that it’ll happen and that we must act now.
Cities are already trying to protect themselves from rising waters by using a variety of strategies:
- building projects like sea walls and surge barriers to keep the water out
- ecological approaches such as land reclamation and the restoration of mangroves and wetlands to absorb the floodwaters
