Building a floating city for those who will have to abandon their homes due to rising sea levels: it's happening in the Maldives.
The futuristic renderings show colourful houses, each with its own small jetty, basketball courts and squares where people can gather in the shade of palm trees. With one distinctive feature: everything sits on the surface of the water. This is how the new floating city under construction in the Maldives presents itself, ten minutes by boat from the capital Malé. A pioneering project born out of a very real need: to offer a place to live for people who will have to abandon their homes due to rising sea levels.
Among the manifestations of climate change is the increasingly rapid melting of the Antarctic ice sheet and that of Greenland. As a consequence, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Ipcc) estimates that between 1993 and 2003 sea levels rose by around 3.1 millimetres per year. A recent analysis argues that, even keeping global warming within 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, they will rise by another half a metre by 2100. And this is not too distant a scenario, given that we have a 50 per cent chance of exceeding 1.5 degrees as early as 2026.
This phenomenon risks being a catastrophe for small island states. Such as the Maldives. The archipelago is made up of 1,190 islands: 80 per cent of their surface lies less than one metre above sea level. Within a few decades, or even a few years, entire portions of territory could be submerged. And the inhabitants will be forced to relocate elsewhere.
A genuine housing emergency thus looms for the 540,000 people who live in the Maldives: 200,000 of them alone are packed into the eight square kilometres of the capital Malé. To find a solution, a joint venture was formed between the government and the Dutch property development company Dutch Docklands. The project, entrusted to the (also Dutch) architecture firm Waterstudio, plans to build a floating city with everything needed to house 20,000 residents: not just homes and streets, therefore, but also schools, restaurants and shops.
CNN reports that the first floating housing units will be unveiled during June. They are built in a local shipyard and then towed to their exact location. They are subsequently fixed to a large underwater concrete hull, which in turn is bolted to the seabed by means of telescopic steel stilts. The architecture firm assures that these structures will not be vulnerable to climate change, because they will float and rise with the waves. All of this without residents suffering from seasickness, thanks to the natural insulation provided by the coral reefs.
A total of 5,000 will be built. The city will be inhabited from 2024, but the end of construction will not come until 2027. In addition to carrying out a thorough environmental impact assessment, the builders have created artificial coral reefs designed to encourage the growth of marine organisms.
