Sustainable floating cities need to be more than just a temporary solution

UNCONVENTIONAL and seemingly extreme responses to climate change, related sea-level rise, and floods are gaining considerable attention, with the goals of creating adaptable homes and reducing mass migration.

In April, the United Nations hosted a high-level roundtable on "sustainable floating cities" in New York City, and deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed requested advanced proposals for September's UN Climate Action Summit. Ocean engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with architectural firms and organisations with ties to Denmark, French Polynesia and the United States, are drafting designs for a "sustainable floating city" with a low ecological footprint. Of particular interest is a large floating structure's resilience to floods and sea-level rise for many coastal cities, settlements near river deltas, and islands in Oceania and elsewhere in the world.

The plan is less eccentric than it might initially sound. Several thousand offshore oil platforms with living quarters and cruise ships have operated in the world's oceans for decades. The yet undefined term "floating city" can refer to a variety of large floating structures that could be combined. Inspired by oil platforms, a free-market libertarian US-Thai couple built a small, offshore floating homestead off Phuket in Thailand earlier this year. Weeks later, the Thai navy ended that attempt to escape state control. In 2018, Russia launched a floating nuclear power plant, the Akademik Lomonosov. China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation constructed the first, semi-submersible fish farm, Ocean Farm 1, for Norwegian company SalMar, raising 1.5 million salmon several miles off the Norwegian coast.