With cities running out of space and rising sea levels predicted to put 800 million city dwellers at risk by 2050, more of us may have to get used to living on water.
One nation adapting to this challenge is the Netherlands, where more than a quarter of the country already lies below sea level.
In Amsterdam, the capital city, residents and architects have created a visionary floating neighborhood called Schoonschip — Dutch for "clean ship."
This is what the floating houses look like. Schoonschip / Isabel Nabuurs
"Since urban areas struggle with high density, we should make better use of the space on the water," says project architect, Space&Matter.
"With Schoonschip we want to set the example, and show how living on water can be a great and better alternative for people and our planet."
Schoonschip / Isabel Nabuurs
The project is small in size — just more than 100 residents live in 46 homes on 30 arks floating — but it's also designed to be self-sufficient, with minimal impact on nature.
Solar panels and heat pumps provide heating. Wastewater from toilets and showers is converted back into energy and many residents also have a green roof, where they can grow their own food.
The floating Dutch community of Schoonschip is designed to be self-sustaining, including generating its own energy. Schoonschip / Metabolic
Life on Water
Floating communities aren't new — they've been around for generations in some parts of the world. Examples include the Uros people, who live on floating reed islands in Lake Titicaca, Peru, and the Bajau people of Southeast Asia, who live on small houseboats off the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
In more recent times, interest in water living has grown as the world seeks solutions to the twin pressures of population density and climate change causing sea levels to rise.
Schoonschip / Isabel Nabuurs
Projects elsewhere in the world include modular water dwellings being developed by British architect firm Grimshaw and Dutch manufacturer Concrete Valley.
These sit on a floating pontoon structure that rises with the water level to keep the home safe in the event of a tidal surge or flooding.
"With a growing global population and an increase of people living in cities, high land values are causing a shortage of affordable housing in urban areas," the designers say.
While in Denmark, end-of-life shipping containers have been used to create floating student accommodation in a design by architect firm Urban Rigger.
Twin Challenges
More than 570 low-lying coastal cities will be threatened by sea-level rises of at least half a meter, by 2050, according to C40 Cities, a network dedicated to finding climate change solutions.
But the problem extends far beyond cities, to island nations, including Kiribati in the Pacific, where 81% of households had been affected by sea-level rise in the decade between 2006 and 2016. Here, migration is considered the main solution.
As people move to cities to live and work, almost 70% of the world's population is expected to be living in urban areas by 2050, up from 55% currently.
Many cities are looking underground to find more space. For example, Finland's capital Helsinki has created a host of underground facilities including sports venues and an emergency shelter, while Montreal in Canada has an 'underground city' including shops and hotels beneath its streets.
UN-Habitat, the United Nations program for human settlements and sustainable urban development, estimates that by 2030, three billion people, about 40% of the world's population, will need access to adequate housing. This translates into a demand for 96,000 new affordable and accessible housing units every day.
Building homes on the water and underground could be part of the solution.
Reposted with permission from the World Economic Forum.
It's little wonder Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte enjoys commuting to his office there. And recently he's made the journey by bike as often as possible.
"I didn't cycle a lot for 10 years. But for the past two years, I've had my own bike again and, when the weather allows, I travel into the office that way," he told the World Economic Forum.
Cycling Craze
More than a quarter of trips in the Netherlands 2016 were made by bike.
Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis
The Dutch are famous for their love of cycling. In 2018, the country had more bicycles than people: 23 million to 17 million. More than a quarter of all trips in the country are made by bike and of those, a quarter are for getting work, like Rutte.
He explains why it's long been such a phenomenon: "The Dutch love cycling because we are a small country. We have to get from A to B. And of course taking a car, yes, is an option, but you have congestion plus the environmental impact. From the old days, almost from the late 19th century, we're used to taking a bicycle."
Enabled by Infrastructure
The country's flat landscape is perfect for trips on two wheels. But it has also carefully designed its transport infrastructure to promote cycling.
There are more than 35,000 kilometers (21,750 miles) of cycle lanes and the city of Utrecht is home to the world's biggest underground bike park.
Rutte admits he was impressed with how well-oiled the system is: "I was amazed how many specific biking traffic lights and biking lanes we now have – and so many more than 10 years ago.
"They're not only in the city but also in local communities between cities, which makes it very safe and easy, particularly for small children when they go to school."
Healthy for People and Planet
The health benefits of cycling are well-known: it reduces the risk of illnesses such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, and can help boost mental wellbeing.
A 2015 study found more than 6,000 deaths in the Netherlands are prevented each year due to cycling, and it adds six months to the average life expectancy.
This saves the country's economy more than $20 million a year.
The benefits to the environment are also huge: switching from a car to a bicycle saves an average of 150 grammes of carbon dioxide per kilometre, according to the Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis.
As Rutte says: "The whole system is nudging people to make use of this very healthy alternative."
Note: This article is part of the Sustainable Development Impact Summit.
Reposted with permission from our media associate World Economic Forum.
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Eye-Catching Designs Made from Recycled Plastic Bottles
The company sells a range of eco-friendly items like leggings, rash guards, and board shorts that are made using recycled post-consumer plastic bottles. There are currently 16 causes represented by distinct marine-life patterns, from whale shark research and invasive lionfish removal to sockeye salmon monitoring and abalone restoration.
One such organization is Get Inspired, a nonprofit that specializes in ocean restoration and environmental education. Get Inspired founder, marine biologist Nancy Caruso, says supporting on-the-ground efforts is one thing that sets Waterlust apart, like their apparel line that supports Get Inspired abalone restoration programs.
"All of us [conservation partners] are doing something," Caruso said. "We're not putting up exhibits and talking about it — although that is important — we're in the field."
Waterlust not only helps its conservation partners financially so they can continue their important work. It also helps them get the word out about what they're doing, whether that's through social media spotlights, photo and video projects, or the informative note card that comes with each piece of apparel.
"They're doing their part for sure, pushing the information out across all of their channels, and I think that's what makes them so interesting," Caruso said.
And then there are the clothes, which speak for themselves.
Advocate Apparel to Start Conversations About Conservation
Waterlust's concept of "advocate apparel" encourages people to see getting dressed every day as an opportunity to not only express their individuality and style, but also to advance the conversation around marine science. By infusing science into clothing, people can visually represent species and ecosystems in need of advocacy — something that, more often than not, leads to a teaching moment.
"When people wear Waterlust gear, it's just a matter of time before somebody asks them about the bright, funky designs," said Waterlust's CEO, Patrick Rynne. "That moment is incredibly special, because it creates an intimate opportunity for the wearer to share what they've learned with another."
The idea for the company came to Rynne when he was a Ph.D. student in marine science.
"I was surrounded by incredible people that were discovering fascinating things but noticed that often their work wasn't reaching the general public in creative and engaging ways," he said. "That seemed like a missed opportunity with big implications."
Waterlust initially focused on conventional media, like film and photography, to promote ocean science, but the team quickly realized engagement on social media didn't translate to action or even knowledge sharing offscreen.
Rynne also saw the "in one ear, out the other" issue in the classroom — if students didn't repeatedly engage with the topics they learned, they'd quickly forget them.
"We decided that if we truly wanted to achieve our goal of bringing science into people's lives and have it stick, it would need to be through a process that is frequently repeated, fun, and functional," Rynne said. "That's when we thought about clothing."
Support Marine Research and Sustainability in Style
To date, Waterlust has sold tens of thousands of pieces of apparel in over 100 countries, and the interactions its products have sparked have had clear implications for furthering science communication.
For Caruso alone, it's led to opportunities to share her abalone restoration methods with communities far and wide.
"It moves my small little world of what I'm doing here in Orange County, California, across the entire globe," she said. "That's one of the beautiful things about our partnership."
Check out all of the different eco-conscious apparel options available from Waterlust to help promote ocean conservation.
Melissa Smith is an avid writer, scuba diver, backpacker, and all-around outdoor enthusiast. She graduated from the University of Florida with degrees in journalism and sustainable studies. Before joining EcoWatch, Melissa worked as the managing editor of Scuba Diving magazine and the communications manager of The Ocean Agency, a non-profit that's featured in the Emmy award-winning documentary Chasing Coral.
This is particularly true for the country's infrastructure. Highways, water treatment facilities and the power grid are at increasing risk to extreme weather events and other effects of a changing climate.
The problem is that most infrastructure projects, including the Trump administration's infrastructure revitalization plan, typically ignore the risks of climate change.
In our work researching sustainability and infrastructure, we encourage and are starting to shift toward designing man-made infrastructure systems with adaptability in mind.
Designing for the Past
Infrastructure systems are the front line of defense against flooding, heat, wildfires, hurricanes and other disasters. City planners and citizens often assume that what is built today will continue to function in the face of these hazards, allowing services to continue and to protect us as they have done so in the past. But these systems are designed based on histories of extreme events.
Pumps, for example, are sized based on historical precipitation events. Transmission lines are designed within limits of how much power they can move while maintaining safe operating conditions relative to air temperatures. Bridges are designed to be able to withstand certain flow rates in the rivers they cross. Infrastructure and the environment are intimately connected.
I-10 flooding gives a new meaning to car pool! #azwx #monsoon http://t.co/QaGFvUvs8f— Michael Chow (@Michael Chow)1410186689.0
Now, however, the country is more frequently exceeding these historical conditions and is expected to see more frequent and intense extreme weather events. Said another way, because of climate change, natural systems are now changing faster than infrastructure.
How can infrastructure systems adapt? First let's consider the reasons infrastructure systems fail at extremes:
- The hazard exceeds design tolerances. This was the case of Interstate 10 flooding in Phoenix in fall 2014, where the intensity of the rainfall exceeded design conditions.
- During these times there is less extra capacity across the system: When something goes wrong there are fewer options for managing the stressor, such as rerouting flows, whether it's water, electricity or even traffic.
- We often demand the most from our infrastructure during extreme events, pushing systems at a time when there is little extra capacity.
Gradual change also presents serious problems, partly because there is no distinguishing event that spurs a call to action. This type of situation can be especially troublesome in the context of maintenance backlogs and budget shortfalls which currently plague many infrastructure systems. Will cities and towns be lulled into complacency only to find that their long-lifetime infrastructure systems are no longer operating like they should?
Currently the default seems to be securing funding to build more of what we've had for the past century. But infrastructure managers should take a step back and ask what our infrastructure systems need to do for us into the future.
Agile and Flexible by Design
Fundamentally new approaches are needed to meet the challenges not only of a changing climate, but also of disruptive technologies.
These include increasing integration of information and communication technologies, which raises the risk of cyberattacks. Other emerging technologies include autonomous vehicles and drones as well as intermittent renewable energy and battery storage in the place of conventional power systems. Also, digitally connected technologies fundamentally alter individuals' cognition of the world around us: Consider how our mobile devices can now reroute us in ways that we don't fully understand based on our own travel behavior and traffic across a region.
Yet our current infrastructure design paradigms emphasize large centralized systems intended to last for decades and that can withstand environmental hazards to a preselected level of risk. The problem is that the level of risk is now uncertain because the climate is changing, sometimes in ways that are not very well-understood. As such, extreme events forecasts may be a little or a lot worse.
Given this uncertainty, agility and flexibility should be central to our infrastructure design. In our research, we've seen how a number of cities have adopted principles to advance these goals already, and the benefits they provide.
In Kuala Lampur, traffic tunnels are able to transition to stormwater management during intense precipitation events, an example of multifunctionality.
Across the U.S., citizen-based smartphone technologies are beginning to provide real-time insights. For instance, the CrowdHydrology project uses flooding data submitted by citizens that the limited conventional sensors cannot collect.
Infrastructure designers and managers in a number of U.S. locations, including New York, Portland, Miami and Southeast Florida, and Chicago are now required to plan for this uncertain future—a process called roadmapping. For example, Miami has developed a $500 million plan to upgrade infrastructure, including installing new pumping capacity and raising roads to protect at-risk oceanfront property.
These competencies align with resilience-based thinking and move the country away from our default approaches of simply building bigger, stronger or more redundant.
Planning for Uncertainty
Because there is now more uncertainty with regard to hazards, resilience instead of risk should be central to infrastructure design and operation in the future. Resilience means systems can withstand extreme weather events and come back into operation quickly.
This means infrastructure planners cannot simply change their design parameter—for example, building to withstand a 1,000-year event instead of a 100-year event. Even if we could accurately predict what these new risk levels should be for the coming century, is it technically, financially or politically feasible to build these more robust systems?
This is why resilience-based approaches are needed that emphasize the capacity to adapt. Conventional approaches emphasize robustness, such as building a levee that is able to withstand a certain amount of sea level rise. These approaches are necessary but given the uncertainty in risk we need other strategies in our arsenal.
For example, providing infrastructure services through alternative means when our primary infrastructure fails, such as deploying microgrids ahead of hurricanes. Or, planners can design infrastructure systems such that when they fail, the consequences to human life and the economy are minimized.
The Netherlands has changed its system of dykes and flood management in certain areas to better sustain flooding.
This is a practice recently implemented in the Netherlands, where the Rhine delta rivers are allowed to flood but people are not allowed to live in the flood plain and farmers are compensated when their crops are lost.
Uncertainty is the new normal, and reliability hinges on positioning infrastructure to operate in and adapt to this uncertainty. If the country continues to commit to building last century's infrastructure, we can continue to expect failures of these critical systems and the losses that come along with them.
As Trump Neglects Climate Threats, Cities Move Forward https://t.co/YnPifJBSp0 #ClimateChange @NRDC @UCSUSA… https://t.co/VfFc2cMVIc— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1519142429.0
Reposted with permission from our media associate The Conversation.
As President Obama's signature Clean Power Plan heads to court, the Dutch parliament voted Thursday to shut down its entire coal industry. The move is needed in order for the country to meet its 2030 goal to reduce carbon emissions by 55 percent.
The action would put the Netherlands in position to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement. The 77 to 72 vote, while non-binding, comes on the heels of a recent confidential study, leaked to the Dutch newspaper Trouw, that one or more plants would have to be closed. The country has five coal plants currently in operation, including three that just came online last year. A recent five percent increase in emissions has been linked to its newest plants.
In June, 2015, a court in The Hague ordered the Dutch government to cut its emissions by 25 percent within five years. The unprecedented ruling came in a case brought by the Dutch Urgenda Foundation. In a transcript from the reading of the verdict, the court said: "The state must do more to avert the imminent danger caused by climate change, also in view of its duty of care to protect and improve the living environment." The government has appealed the ruling.
In the leaked document, the consulting firm CE Delft said that the Dutch government would need to quickly close one or two power plants to meet the court's order. They concluded that closing the plants would impose lower costs to society than other alternatives to achieve the court-imposed emissions target. The report estimated that the average household would save 80 Euros ($90 at current exchange rates) a year, against costs of 30 Euros ($34). The Dutch economic ministry estimated that the cost of closing all the country's coal plants by 2020 would total 7 billion Euros ($7.9 billion).
Last year, five older coal-fired plants were decommissioned. Some environmentalists think that a coalition agreement could keep some or all of the three newer plants open. The issue has been contentious and is likely to affect next year's Dutch elections. The right-wing, populist Freedom Party, which may block the parliament's plan, currently leads many opinion polls.
In the U.S., 94 coal plants were shut down last year, with another 41 expected to the shuttered in 2016. Aging plants and cheap natural gas are driving the transition from coal, even as 26 states are suing the federal government to overturn the Clean Power Plan. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit will hear oral arguments Sept. 27.
Even if the Clean Power Plan survives this challenge, a study published today in Nature Climate Change says that the U.S. will miss its 2025 carbon emissions target by a wide amount, as much as 1.5 billion metric tons per year. Nevertheless, "The study underscores the importance of EPA's Clean Power Plan for meeting the climate change promises," wrote Science this morning.
This week the Netherlands announced that would join the U.S., United Kingdom and others in ending support for public financing for new coal-fired power plants is a good sign for the growing fossil fuel divestment movement.
“This is another sign that the coal industry is on its last legs,” said Tim Ratcliffe, of 350.org, which is helping coordinate the global movement to divest from the fossil fuel industry. “There’s a growing consensus that coal has no place in a carbon constrained world. Coal isn’t just bad news for the climate, it’s increasingly bad news for any financial portfolio. Institutional investors should read the writing on the wall and divest.”
In their joint announcement, the U.S. and Netherlands stated, “We emphasize that our work to scale up climate-friendly investments in developing countries is most effective when combined with reducing public incentives for high-carbon infrastructure.”
“We need to redirect the flow of capital away from carbon-intensive investments and into climate solutions,” said Ratcliffe. “As value-driven institutions, universities, churches and pension funds should be leaders in helping speed up this transition.”
Dutch campaigners call on the Dutch pension fund ABP, one of the largest pension funds in the world, to divest from fossil fuels. ABP’s large exposure to high-carbon assets, puts the Netherlands at risk, according to a recent study by the Greens/ European Free Alliance. The largest part of ABP’s investments in commodities worth €10 billion is related to oil and gas that risk turning into stranded assets.
“ABP is entrusted with our money to secure our future, not to finance an industry whose business model is based on wrecking our future," said Liset Meddens, coordinator of Fossil Free NL with 350.org. "ABP needs to recognize the financial and environmental risks of fossil fuel assets and start phasing out their investments in this dirty industry.”
The Dutch pension fund would thereby follow Norway’s lead. Norway has set up an expert group to see if its $840 billion oil fund (the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund) should stop investing in fossil fuel companies.
Tuesday’s announcement will also place a new level of scrutiny on the U.S., Netherlands, World Bank and other large investors to make sure that they are living up to their commitment to stop supporting high-carbon infrastructure. Analysis by the group Oil Change International, for example, has shown that despite its climate commitments, the World Bank actually increased its funding for fossil fuel projects between 2012 and 2013. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is currently deliberating on whether or not approve a permit for the carbon-intensive Keystone XL pipeline.
“It would be completely hypocritical for the Obama Administration to say that it wants to reduce public support for high-carbon infrastructure and then approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which is a fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet, the Canadian tar sands,” said Jamie Henn, 350.org strategy and communications director. “If the U.S. wants its climate commitments to be taken seriously by the international community, it needs to reject Keystone XL.”
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