Windfall

by McKenzie Funk

  The conference moved on to other sticky questions, starting with how an island nation could retain its fishing and offshore mineral rights when, according to the Law of the Sea, maritime territory is based on where your coastline is. If a country no longer had any coastline because it was underwater, would all be lost? An Australian professor, all waving hands and furrowed brow, offered the most convincing solution: Island nations should amend their domestic laws to use only geographical coordinates when defining their coastlines, not physical landmarks. Claim in the legislation that the lines will be periodically updated by further legislation, she suggested—“but then don’t ever update it.” And hope the world goes along with it.

  The Columbia disaster expert Klaus Jacob, whose research on New York City’s vulnerability to storm surges would turn him into a minor media star after Hurricane Sandy, presented his study of how long, and at what cost, the Marshallese capital would be sustainable. For planning purposes, he explained, “risk” was measured in dollars per year—a function of the annual probability of hazards multiplied by the value of the assets, multiplied by those assets’ degree of vulnerability. Majuro had more than thirty thousand people packed onto 3.7 square miles of land with an average elevation below seven feet. “Looking at it,” he said, “it’s the many small events, not the occasional big event,” that will contribute the most to losses. On average, the city would have to pay out 10 to 100 percent of the total value of all its buildings and infrastructure every year if seas were a meter higher—a crushing rate that no poor country, no matter how flush from litigation, could afford. “I think the only possibility is to reduce the population on Majuro,” he concluded, “and just leave a steward population. And then, in a thousand years—that’s how long it’ll take for the seas to go back down—your people can go back.”

  The conference’s most hotly contended issue was whether there should be a new climate refugee law, or whether existing refugee law could be expanded, or whether nothing could be done at all. “It is difficult to pinpoint climate per se as the reason for migration,” noted an International Organization for Migration official. We learned that many thousands of Marshallese—perhaps a tenth of the islands’ current population—had immigrated to Springdale, Arkansas. Springdale was the headquarters of Tyson Foods, the fast-food supplier and the largest meat producer in the world. Marshallese fleeing their country had landed there for slaughterhouse jobs that even Mexicans were beginning to eschew, and amid false accusations of bringing in leprosy and spreading tuberculosis, they now provided a new vital service for America: cheap chicken. But Springdale was an aside. Mostly, the scholars argued over precedents. The islanders got fed up.

  “You know, this question reminds me of a story,” said a Marshallese minister. “I was involved in the cleanup of Enewetak Atoll, one of the atolls used in the nuclear testing.” In the late 1970s, the Americans scraped radioactive soil and debris off the surfaces of the surrounding islands and enclosed ninety-five thousand cubic yards of it in a bomb hole known as Cactus Crater. “They wanted to put up warning signs to warn people not to come to the island,” he said. “They asked, what would you like us to write on these signs? My answer was: ‘Don’t ask us. You dumped it there. You ask yourself, and we’ll put the words in there for you.’

  “Now you ask us about the loss of a country,” he continued, “the loss of a people, the loss of their culture and their identity. You ask us, what do you want to do? Where do you want to swim? Well, I don’t know. But you tell us when to swim.”

  For the three days, this was the pattern: indignation from islanders followed by clinical detachment from at least some of the scholars, followed by more indignation, with many of the endangered people in the room—Maldivians, Bahamians, Micronesians, Nauruans, Saint Lucians, Palauans, Kiribatians—wincing every time one of the lawyers stated the meeting’s premise out loud. The academics tiptoed for the most part, very aware they were charting a rational path to the unthinkable, and sometimes the gaps were visible anyway. “Perhaps more should be said about why to maintain the state,” said a Law of the Sea expert from the Netherlands one morning. “If you want to convince the international community to maintain these states notwithstanding all the problems, you will have to indicate why, and for what purpose, and what the objectives are.” He wondered what was wrong with two alternatives to the conference’s convoluted legal solutions: that endangered nations make land purchases abroad—an option already being publicly discussed by some governments—and what he deemed even “more realistic,” a simple merger of various Pacific states, including some with higher ground, into a new country. Everyone could just squeeze in together. “That would ensure many of the objectives,” he said smugly. There was a momentary silence—perhaps a room contemplating whether the Netherlands wouldn’t mind being united with Germany if it was convenient for the rest of us—and another scholar stepped in to set him straight. “From an ethical perspective,” she began, “I think the answer is obvious. They are sovereign nations, some after a long struggle, and they want to maintain this.”

  • • •

  THAT SOMEONE FROM the famously low-lying Netherlands could be so practical about sea-level rise was no surprise. The wealthy country’s unlikely response to too much water mirrored that of others long facing a shortage of it: Experts in drought, Spain, Australia, and Israel, were not always happy about climate change, but they had found reason to improve on desalination plant designs, and now they were happy to sell you one; experts in flooding, the Dutch were not especially worried about climate change—and would gladly sell you a seawall. The Netherlands’ history of battling land subsidence and reclaiming acreage from the boggy Rhine-Meuse delta dates back to the Middle Ages: The iconic windmills were used to power the pumps. Its faith in techno-fixes is grounded in a landscape that has become almost entirely man-made. Two-thirds of its population lives and 70 percent of its GDP is generated below sea level. In 1997, the country completed the $7.5 billion Delta Works: dikes, dams, and tidal barriers that make up the world’s greatest coastal defense network, an engineering marvel far more complicated than any wall of trees or border barricade.

  As the rest of the planet began worrying about the sea, the Netherlands aggressively promoted its water management expertise abroad, from dredging and engineering firms to amphibious architects. It could tout one prominent international success story already: Manhattan, home to Columbia and its legal conference, looked the way it did thanks in part to land reclamation by early Dutch settlers in what was then New Amsterdam. So long as the Dutch were in the Netherlands, Old Amsterdam could be expected to keep looking the way it did, too; the country’s best advertising was its continued existence. In a testament to its seawalls, it was at the bottom of Maplecroft’s Climate Change Vulnerability Index, near northerly Iceland, Denmark, Finland, and Norway: 160th out of 170 countries surveyed.

  I had traveled to the Netherlands before the legal conference to understand how different climate change was for this wealthy country than it was for Bangladesh or the Marshall Islands. In Amsterdam at an event called Aquaterra, billed as the first gathering of the world’s threatened river delta cities—from New Orleans to Jakarta to Ho Chi Minh City to New York—I watched the opening speaker declare that we were here because of a “new vision.” “It’s about adapting, about business development,” she said, “about challenges and chances, value creation, solidarity, and being entrepreneurs!” In Naaldwijk, the site of the ten-million-square-foot FloraHolland building, where “fresh cut” flowers landed daily from Kenya, India, and Colombia for the world’s largest flower auction, I got a well-worn tour of a state-of-the-art floating greenhouse. In the ancient city of Delft, elevation 3.3 feet, I visited a lab where “smart soils” were being developed to fill cracks in dikes and save the Netherlands from levee failures like those that drowned New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. “The idea is to use bacteria to create bonds,” explained a professor at the public-priva
te institute Deltares. “You can create sandstone in a week, when it takes a million years in nature. With 100 billion bacteria, you can catalyze anything.” They fed the bacteria urea—“It’s what they like to eat,” the professor said—and were trying to scale up the process through genetic modification. Smart soils could also be sold abroad. I would later see a Swedish architect propose using the technology as an alternative to the Great Green Wall: Dump some bacteria on the Sahara and simply freeze the dunes in place, in the process creating “antidesertification architecture” that could house climate refugees.

  An hour from the Netherlands’ reinforced coastline, amid the rolling hills and farmland, was one spot where the country was admitting defeat in its war against water. Yet even this would illustrate how different climate change was for those who could afford to adapt. Overdiepse was a teardrop-shaped, two-square-mile island of reclaimed land, or polder, as it is known, in the middle of the Maas River. The Netherlands is sometimes described as the drain for the rest of Europe, and in the case of the Maas, or Meuse, the flow comes courtesy of Belgium and France. As Europe’s climate changes, the river is expected to swell with ever heavier rains. The Netherlands’ response to higher water had always been higher dikes, but the national government had run the numbers and decided it could no longer keep up. Through a program called Room for the River, forty sites, including Overdiepse Polder, would be sacrificed—left mostly undefended as floodplains—so that more developed, less expendable regions could be protected. Among Overdiepse’s eighteen farming families would be the first refugees in the world whose exodus could be so clearly attributed to climate change, or at least to fear of climate change.

  One morning, the local Room for the River coordinator and I drove over a bridge that connected Overdiepse to the mainland and parked at a house belonging to a dairy farmer. Thirty-two years earlier, the smiling, spiky-haired man had been the first baby born on the polder, and now he sat here with his own baby and his two-year-old daughter, who offered me a wad of Silly Putty. His farmhouse would be demolished, the farmer said, along with the barn that housed his cows. But he was happy: His was one of nine families that would be allowed to stay on the polder, on an elevated mound built with government help, and this would give him room to expand his dairy. The other nine families were getting multimillion-euro payouts. One used the money to buy better land in North Holland, another to buy a farm in the south. One neighbor took the government money and moved to Canada, where there was plenty of open space and where the weather was getting better every year. “He already has ninety cows!” the farmer said.

  Downstream of Overdiepse, dredging at one of the Room for the River sites had also threatened the habitat of a brown, eel-like, bottom-feeding indigenous fish called the weather loach. To satisfy Dutch environmental laws, a crew of four biologists, two hydraulic cranes, and one tractor working ten hours a day, five days a week, for six weeks had just relocated 1,636 weather loaches. They accomplished the task with a typical Dutch flair for engineering: They dammed off irrigation ditches in two-hundred-foot sections, pumped out nearly all the water, then sent men in with waders and nets. As a final step, they dumped loads of ditch sludge on dry ground and sifted through it by hand.

  I asked the Room for the River coordinator how much money had been allotted to make the eighteen Overdiepse families whole again, and the answer was almost $140 million—by chance the same amount, give or take a few million, that the Netherlands had by then pledged in climate aid for the developing world. The budget for the entire Room for the River project was almost $3 billion—more than has ever been disbursed by all international climate funds combined.

  • • •

  BACK BY THE SEA, six miles away from the global headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell, I met another morning with a young architect whose target market grew the more nations like the Marshall Islands began to sink. Koen Olthuis was thirty-nine at the time and already hailed as a visionary. CNN and the BBC liked to quote him, and he once finished 122nd in a vote for Time magazine’s 100 most influential people—out of the top tier, unfortunately, but above Katie Couric, above Osama bin Laden, and above Mary J. Blige. “There is life as we are used to it,” he told me, “and we think we have to keep it exactly the way it is right now. But if we can change how we react to Mother Nature, then climate change is just another effect—it’s a chance. I think too many people still see it as a problem. Of course, there are some problems, but let’s focus on how it can improve our lives.” He was tall, with a mop of wavy hair, and he wore standard-issue architect garb: black undershirt, black V-neck sweater, dark jeans, leather boots. As he talked, he looked out the big window of his office, a redbrick building just a few feet above a canal.

  “We are lucky to be here in the playing garden of solutions,” he said. Once, “this was a country as an empty painting. We filled it with roads, houses, and bridges, and we’ve kept filling it—the painting is never done.” The Netherlands was winning a multifront war against seawater, rivers, and rain. “The big reason that other countries are interested in our solutions,” he continued, “is that many cities, many big cities—almost 90 percent of them—are next to the water. They are next to a river, to an ocean, to a delta system. We’re talking about New York, Tokyo, Singapore, et cetera. They are all in the same boat.”

  For years, the Netherlands had been playing defense. It erected barriers and pumped water out of the polders. Olthuis’s vision, in brief, was to play offense—to build a floating world on top of the water rather than trying to keep the water out. Together with his development company, Dutch Docklands, he designed not houseboats but islands and infrastructure: highways, apartment buildings, parks, airports, churches, and mosques. He dreamed of floating and hybrid cities as big as 100,000-person Delft. “We are part of the climate-change generation,” he said excitedly. “Architects and creative people should be the ones designing this new world. Others can always look back, but we need new ideas. This is our drive and our duty—we have to do it! If we don’t do it, who else will do it? We should make it happen!”

  To really work, a floating foundation had to feel just like what we already knew: solid ground. Rigidity was key. The larger it was, the more easily this could be achieved. “It will be exactly as you see out there now,” he said, pointing out the window. He pulled out a sheet of paper and began sketching on it with a black marker. “With a houseboat, my house is here. And then I have to park my car over here. I have to walk. My children cannot play outside. But on islands, they can play outside, and I can park my car on it, and there are trees on it—that’s what I like!” With luck and good lawyers, the hybrid cities of the future would sit partly upon Olthuis’s proprietary buoyant foundations: modular, interlocking units made of foam and concrete and protected by a suite of international patents.

  His designs were eminently exportable. “You can find sinking islands worldwide,” he told me. “There are many, many island nations with this problem.” Tuvalu and Kiribati could not expect to save themselves by ringing their various atolls with seawalls—as in the Marshalls, the scale and cost of it were inconceivable. But artificial islands, whether or not the lawyers said they were enough for future UN membership, held promise.

  Olthuis was planning his first visit to the Maldives in little more than a month. The lowest-lying country in the world, consisting of more than a thousand islands and twenty-six atolls spread along a six-hundred-mile-long archipelago in the Indian Ocean, was an alluring opportunity: Its leaders believed strongly in climate change—they held a cabinet meeting in scuba gear six feet underwater as a publicity stunt before Copenhagen—and among AOSIS countries it was relatively wealthy, a vacation hideaway for the rich and famous. And the tourism economy meant that it was already feeling the effects of climate change. Hotel chains, like oil companies, have a longer investment horizon than many industries, often twenty to thirty years. They weren’t eager to sink money into beach resorts, Olthuis said, whose b
eaches were eroding away.

  He had a patent-pending solution: a floating beach. He pulled up a drawing on his PC and showed me how it could attach to an existing island, expanding the life of a resort. In the stilted language of the patent application, the concrete-foam design would entail “a floating base on which beach material, such as sand, is applied to form the beach, with the particularity that the artificial beach has a flexible mat that is at least partially underwater.” Its key technology, I was surprised to learn, was bacteria-produced artificial sandstone, a smart soil like that developed at nearby Deltares. The market was so much more than sinking islands, Olthuis said: “Dubai has hundreds of kilometers of coastline that are constantly being eroded.” For a short moment, I could almost imagine the global elite bobbing along on a sandy bed of urine-fueled, genetically modified bacteria.

  On his PC, Olthuis flipped to an earlier project Dutch Docklands had been hired to develop in Dubai. Known as the Floating Proverb, it was part of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s famous Palm Islands, man-made archipelagoes that were themselves constructed in part by Dutch dredging and land reclamation companies. The eighty-nine floating islands of the Floating Proverb were to have spelled out a poem written by the sheikh himself: “It takes a man of vision to write on water/Not everyone who rides a horse is a jockey/Great men rise to greater challenges.” Since the financial crisis, this and much else in Dubai had ground to a halt. Aerial photographs revealed that the once prestigious development the World, an artificial archipelagic Earth, was already losing its shape, its component islands falling back into the sea. But for Olthuis, Dubai’s boom and bust had worked out fine. He had been paid to develop his vision, and whether or not building resumed, he was confident there was plenty of other water out there.

  Under the header “Green IP,” the Dutch Docklands Web site would soon show images of floating gardens, floating solar panels, and even a floating, water-cooled mosque. The company began marketing what it called Affordable H2Ousing: the architects’ solution to the lawyers’ quandary. There was an uncaptioned photo of the floating prison at Zaandam. There was a quotation from Olthuis’s partner, Paul van de Camp: “We told the president of the Maldives, we can transform you from climate refugees to climate innovators.” Dutch Docklands and the Maldives would soon ink agreements for everything from floating villas to a floating marina. Greenstar, a two-million-square-foot floating garden island with shops, restaurants, and a conference center that was originally designed for Dubai, would be recycled and rebranded as a Maldivian national icon. “The green-covered, star-shape building symbolizes Maldivians’ innovative route to conquer climate change,” read the ad copy. “This will become the Number 1 location for conferences about climate change, water management, and sustainability.”