Giant dams enclosing North Sea ‘could protect millions from rising waters’

A DUTCH scientist has proposed building two massive dams in the North Sea, one linking Scotland with Norway, in an attempt to protect 25 million Europeans from rising sea levels.

Sjoerd Groeskamp, an oceanographer at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, said a “possible solution” to global warming’s rising effect on our oceans is to build a 300 mile dam between Scotland and Norway and an additional 100-mile barrier between France and England.

“A rise of 10 metres by the year 2500 is predicted, according to the bleakest scenarios,’ Groeskamp wrote in a paper to be published this month in the American Journal of Meteorology.

“This dam is therefore mainly a call to do something about climate change now.”

“If we do nothing, this extreme dam might just be the only solution,” he added.

The project, dubbed the North Sea Enclosure Dyke, is both technically and economically achievable, according to the authors, with costs of the project estimated at 0.1 per cent GDP of the countries combined.

The sum, estimated to cost between

€250million (£208million) and €500million (£4.1million), was estimated by taking into account the costs of mammoth dams that have been built in South Korea in recent years.

Groeskamp told the Guardian that the calculations had not factored in potential losses, by halting North Sea fishing and increased shipping costs, among other factors.

Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, also told the Guardian the plan could work and that it’s “good that we’re thinking outside the box.”

“If you look back into the 1940s in the UK, the Thames Barrier probably seemed equally ridiculous. It depends what happens in the next 20-30 years, how bad it gets, and then perhaps we will need something like this,” she added.

However, Cloke believes the money, between 250million and 500billion, could be used better by making populations resistant to flooding.

Should global average temperatures increase 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times, sea levels could rise as much as 30.3 inches (77cm) by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The lower limit enshrined in the

Paris Agreement is likely to be breached between 2030 and 2052 if global warming continues at its current pace and unprecedented measures are not taken to stem the increase, a 2018 IPCC report said.

In an alternative move, blueprints have been drawn up to create the planet’s first floating city. The United Nations is spearheading the revolutionary project, which will see self-sufficient buoyant platforms anchored to the sea bed upon which houses can be built. Each one would be sturdy enough to home tens of thousands of people while also boasting typical town features such as public squares and markets.