Rising seas threaten Shanghai, other major cities

[Naveed Yaseen]

* German expert expects water to rise one metre in this century, up to 5 metres over the next 300 years

SHANGHAI: This city of 20 million rose from the sea and grew into a modern showcase, with skyscrapers piercing the clouds, atop tidal flats fed by the mighty Yangtze River.

Now Shanghai’s future depends on finding ways to prevent the same waters from reclaiming it. Global warming and melting glaciers and polar ice sheets are raising sea levels worldwide, leaving tens of millions of people in coastal areas and on low-lying islands vulnerable to flooding and other weather-related catastrophes. Shanghai, altitude roughly three metres (10 feet) above the sea level, is among dozens of great world cities – including London, Miami, New York, New Orleans, Mumbai, Cairo, Amsterdam and Tokyo – threatened by sea levels that now are rising twice as fast as projected just a few years ago, expanding from warmth and meltwater.

Prediction: Estimates of the scale and timing vary, but Stefan Rahmstorf, a respected expert at Germany’s Potsdam Institute, expects a one-metre rise in this century and up to five metres over the next 300 years. Chinese cities are among the largest and most threatened. Their huge populations – the Yangtze River Delta region alone has about 80 million people – and their rapid growth into giant industrial, financial and shipping centres could mean massive losses from rising sea levels, experts say.

The sea is steadily advancing on Shanghai, tainting its freshwater supplies as it turns coastal land and groundwater salty, slowing drainage of the area’s heavily polluted flood basin and eating away at the precious delta soils that form the city’s foundations. Planners are slow in addressing the threat, in the apparent belief they have time. Instead, Shanghai has thrown its energies into constructing billions of dollars worth of new infrastructure – new ports, bridges, airports and industrial zones – right on the coast. “By no means will Shanghai be under the sea 50 years from now. It won’t be like the ‘Day After Tomorrow’ scenario,” says Zheng Hongbo, a geologist who heads the School of Earth Science and Engineering at the Nanjing University.

“Scientifically, though, this is a problem whether we like it or not,” says Zheng, pointing to areas along Shanghai’s coast thought to be shrinking due to erosion caused by rising water levels. In modern times, the city has been sinking for decades, thanks to pumping of groundwater and the construction of thousands of high-rise buildings. Today, Shanghai’s engineers are reinforcing flood gates and levees to contain rivers rising due to heavy silting and subsidence.

“We used to play on the river banks and swim in the water when I was growing up. But the river is higher now,” says Ma Shikang, an engineer overseeing Shanghai’s main flood gate, pointing to homes below water level near the city’s famed riverfront Bund. Twice daily, the 100-metre barrier, where the city’s Suzhou Creek empties into the Huangpu River, is raised and lowered in tandem with the tides and weather, regulating the city’s vast labyrinth of canals and creeks.

The 5.86-metre-high flood gate is built to withstand a one-in-1,000 years tidal surge; the highest modern Shanghai has faced so far was 5.72 metres, during a 1997 typhoon. Levees along the Bund and other major waterways are 6.9 metres high, providing better protection than in Miami, New York and many other cities. But they still would be swamped if hit by a surge like Hurricane Katrina’s 8.5-metre onslaught. Shanghai is considering building still bigger barriers – like those in London, Venice and the Netherlands – to fend off potentially disastrous storm surges, most likely at the point 30 kilometres downstream where the deep, muddy Huangpu empties into the Yangtze.

Sang Baoliang, deputy director of the Shanghai Flood Control Headquarters, has been to see the Thames Barrier, which protects London, and the Deltaworks series of storm barriers and dams in the Netherlands, where two-thirds of the population lives on land below sea level, much of it reclaimed from the sea. ap

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