Abu Dhabi faces climate change flood threat - expert - Culture & Society

Sunday, 11 April 2010 1:48 PM

A leading US academic will tonight warn that Abu Dhabi must invest in research and infrastructure if it is to combat the risk of flooding due to climate change.

David Holland, director of the Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science at New York University, told Arabian Business that the rise in sea levels is “accelerating” and that the UAE capital is “among the dozen or so major cities in the world that are precisely at sea level”.

“[There is] a plausible concern for sea level change that would actually raise the sea level above the current infrastructure,” he said. “That would imply flooding, essentially.”

Holland will present his findings on Sunday evening at a NYU Abu Dhabi Institute event entitled ‘Future Sea Level Projections in New York and Abu Dhabi’. He is speaking as part of an ongoing series by the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute.

Holland explained that the melting of the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica is causing global sea levels to rise by 3mm a year. In 100 years, levels are expected to have risen by 30cm.

A report earlier this year by the Environmental Agency - Abu Dhabi, entitled ‘Climate Change: Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation’, said that around 85 percent of the population and more than 90 percent of the infrastructure in the UAE was located within several metres of the shoreline, and in low-lying areas.

It also stated that “the potential exposure of the UAE, Abu Dhabi in particular, to the impacts of sea level rise given its current socioeconomic conditions in coastal areas is quite significant”.

Holland said there were two solutions to the threat of rising sea levels: reduce carbon emissions by burning less fossil fuels or “build walls around the perimeter of coastlines and migrate softly inland”.

However, he added that research into rising sea levels was still at an early stage and there was not yet sufficient data to know the full impact that burning fossil fuels might have.

“We don’t have reliable projections for sea level because we don’t have the computer models constructed for sea level yet,” he said.

For that reason, Holland believes cities like Abu Dhabi should consider investing in further research into this area.

“The complexity of the problem is that you cannot solve regional sea level change issues until you solve the global one and once you get a handle on the global change then you can figure out what it implies for the region,” he said.

“So regional places are going to have to face up to contributing to global science… I think if Abu Dhabi and other places like that don’t pick up the lead nobody will,” he added.

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Posted by: bonovox Tuesday, 13 April 2010 12:37 PM[UAE] - UAE

Instead of looking at ways to off-set a rise in sea levels we should be forcing western countries / India / China to reduce the emissions and reduce global warming, which is what is causing the rise of sea levels in the first place; let's prevent and not correct.

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Posted by: Jimmy Blue Tuesday, 13 April 2010 9:38 AM[UAE] - UAE

Why is the focus on how much will the sea rise? A few cm's will be a disaster for many nations and few metres will be a global disaster. We all know there is so much evidence out there not just to support 'the theory' but that it is actually happening. Scientific business is muddying the basic common sense premise that if we as Man change the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere, YES the earth will compensate. The arguments about how it will compensate are irrelevant, all forms of compensation will change the way we live drastically. Everyone knows it will happen, the only question is when? The unfortunate thing about this is that it shows that we have no morality when it comes to our children as the general consensus globally is 'as long as it is not in my lifetime' and 'how will it affect my company profits?'

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Posted by: Tristan de Ferluc Tuesday, 13 April 2010 9:08 AM[UAE] - UAE

ADB, the chance to give the right projection for a specific timeline gets probably the same probability as getting the numbers in a national lottery, basically very low. Your are quoting 1 to 2,5m by 2100 ? The last paper in the area was quoting 1 to 9m ? all these figures mostly based on the Himalayan glacier meltdown ? who proved wrong ... I read the document you indicate. It is interesting like many publications but it looks at one relationship only where we may have hundreds of factors if not thousands in the global equation and many more relationships: moon, sun activity, planets, earth own activity, ? There are thousands of publications each year but we are still waiting for the one who will provide the factors involved in the climate change, analyze the inter-actions between them and synthesize them in a model, if possible. We are far away at present time from this understanding as our knowledge in the hundreds of disciplines relating to climate change has to be deeply improved. On top, we face a major difficulty: as we know more, we know less in a way as specializations focus on smaller and smaller areas of sciences, making it difficult to overcome silo-knowledge. The biggest difficulty to understand climate change will probably be first to get the big picture.

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Posted by: Jimmy Blue Tuesday, 13 April 2010 8:45 AM[UAE] - UAE

Does that mean my 10th floor apartment away from the coast will become waterside property and increase in value? That agent was right when he sold it to me.....a good long term investment!

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Posted by: anonymous Tuesday, 13 April 2010 1:04 AM[UAE]

Isn't it great that the specialist talking about flooding of cities is called "Holland"? No wonder he knows so much about it, really.

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