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- Those who master water prosper. We've seen this all the way back to 8,000 BCE when the irrigation system in the Fertile Crescent earned at the title "Cradle of Civilization." Jump forward a bit in time to the Panama Canal, a 40-mile artificial waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, making it crucial to global trade by cutting long, dangerous sea journeys to just 10 hours on the other side of the planet. The three gorgeous dam in China became the world's biggest single source of green power. Today, the potency of water is to be reckoned with more so than ever.
- We used to have a stable climate on this earth for most of human evolution. Right now, we do not. - If you look at a river in a dry period, it's gentle, it's nice, but then overnight it becomes like this monster, this huge deluge of water destroying houses, killing people. How do you control this? How do you tame this monster? - Floods account for nearly half of natural disasters, and compared to previous decades, their numbers have soared. But ideas around the world have emerged to disaster-proof cities with mega projects from Japan's flood tunnels
to massive sea walls and. fly farms? And with a projected market of $1.3 trillion, the business of adaptation is on Wall Street's radar. - Adaptation is still worth it. It's still eminently possible, and plenty of us will be able to adapt given we spend the money wisely. - Behind and below this unasuming door is the world's largest underground flood tunnel system. The Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel.
Tall enough for a space shuttle to take a bath. This structure helps protect the Saitama Prefecture just outside Tokyo from floods by diverting rainwater underground and spitting it back out into the Edo River. It took 13 years to construct and cost roughly $2 billion. Since completion, it has been estimated to reduce flood damage to homes by, hold on, let me check my notes here. 90%. This is Yoshio Miyazaki. He supervises ongoing construction that keeps the facility maintained so that it can accommodate torrents of rainwater.
During heavy rains, five colossal vertical concrete silos, each 70 meters deep, capture overflow from surrounding rivers. The river is then funneled into a 6.3-kilometer-long underground water storage tunnel about 50 meters below ground. From there, water flows into a massive pressure control tank. Aptly-nicknamed as the "Underground Temple." Makes sense to maintain some reverence when dealing with forces in nature, after all.
- Large pumps are able to push water through these tanks. By keeping this underground, the space above remains functional for homes and businesses. Japan has invested heavily in mega projects to protect their citizens from catastrophes something many other nations have not done. Because sitting atop the foreboding named "Ring of Fire," a zone of frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions along the Pacific Rim can come with terrifying and unpredictable consequences. - Japan is one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced country in the world when it comes to preparing for disasters.
Every sector of society, governments, businesses, community groups, even schools, prepare for disaster in a way that we don't see elsewhere. This is something that's gone on for more than a century, really, since a enormous earthquake in 1923 killed tens of thousands of people and really devastated Tokyo. - Japan's capital is one of the most popular cities in the world with 37 million people in the metropolitan area. - When we think about Tokyo, it really is one of the most important city economies globally,
probably second only to New York in terms of its size, and it accounts for about 20% of Japan's GDP - 2022 saw the launch of the Tokyo Resilience Project. - This is a flagship effort and it's aimed at helping Tokyo be more resilient over the next hundred years to flooding earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and it's on a range of things like raising the height of sea walls, moving some infrastructure to higher ground, adding more levees, and it's an effort that should see spending of about $110 billion by the 2040s.
- One big misconception about adaptation is that it's some do-gooder thing that the greens would want us to do, but the serious people of energy here just shouldn't. Gernot, "juggernaut without the jug" Wagner. I'm a climate economist at Columbia Business School - Climate economists don't just think about economic losses from disasters. They consider the opportunities as well. - We basically know that the problem are misguided. market forces are not guiding things in the right direction. And while the problems are economic, the solutions are two.
- One of those solutions is what's called "climate adaptation." - What is adaptation? It is resilience investments, it's making sure that those desirable locations, these valuable properties, maintain their value. - There's a growing recognition even on Wall Street that spending on adaptation isn't just about preventing losses. This is an activity that could potentially also generate revenue. - Figures like Bill Gates have publicly urged for investment in adaptation projects for climate resilience. - Disasters are a hidden cost and they're huge.
We see when a disaster comes in that there's billions of dollars in damage, but we don't understand the economic activity, everyone who's gonna make money from that. That includes clearing debris, the construction costs of rebuilding. And I think human beings are still more in the response that is, they're more reactive to disasters than they are getting ahead of them. - The reinsurer, Munich Re, calculated that in 2024, the cost of natural disasters was about $320 billion. That was up from the year before when it was around $268 billion. About 90% of losses are related to weather risks: typhoons, hurricanes, flooding.
- Adaptation is like a business anticipating a market downturn by taking an early bet to diversify, reinvest, or build cash reserves to weather future disruptions. - Mega projects are really high stakes. They're often changing a geography, potentially displacing communities and having an enormous impact on a local environment. But there's evidence that adaptation projects have helped reduce losses. The Netherlands is a really striking example - Here, some studies indicate the benefit of activities like dike construction along the nation's coastline already greatly exceeds the cost, and one analysis forecasts avoided losses from coastal
flooding could be as much as $21 billion by 2100. The Dutch are such experts on flood mitigation, they've even started exporting it. Witteveen+Bos is one Dutch engineering firm with 23 offices across nine countries, including one in Jakarta, Indonesia, the fastest sinking mega city in the world where the decisions around adaptation and resilience are playing out in real time. - This is the old seawall when I was a kid. So we had the structure to protect us, but the seawater kept coming, coming and coming.
- Jakarta is the worst possible place to build a city. It's built on very, very soft soils, and if you build anything on top of those soils, the city will start sinking. This means we have to keep the sea out of the city and therefore, think about seawalls. My name is Victor Coenen, sometimes called "Mr. Seawall." I would warn against building seawalls everywhere. But yeah, this is the reputation I have. - One notable Witteveen+Bos mega project is a reconstruction of the iconic Afsluitdijk, a dam and causeway that protects the Netherlands from the North Sea.
Here in Jakarta, they're bringing their expertise to build a new seawall. - Indonesia's giant seawall is a, is a project that's been talked about since at least 1995. But what we've seen from President Prabobo Subianto is a massive escalation. Previously, this had been considered as maybe a $10 billion project. Now he's talking about an $80 billion program over 20 years to build a sea wall as long as about 310 miles. - Victor Coenen has been working on Indonesia's flood projects since 2012. - A seawall, if you look at examples all over the world, will cost you about 100 million US dollar for a very simple one per kilometer, and that's a lot of money.
- Seawalls are pretty straightforward. They're walls in the sea. They absorb and deflect waves, but they can also cause erosion and harm people and ecology. - Big seawalls create big problems. You will close off ports, you will close off fishing communities, they will lose access to their fishing grounds. Also, what does the regional communities want? What are the needs? What are the ambitions? So if you design a sea wall, it probably starts not with the technical side of things.
- A simple high wall is inexpensive and stops the waves, but blocks access to the ocean. A wider sloped wall creates more coastline for communities to use, build it offshore and you keep coastlines intact. Options that include land reclamation allow for other uses, which creates more value, but to do so takes more time and money. - In most of the designs on seawalls, you see some form of shape of a land reclamation, because land is scarce in Java, it's a densely-populated island. So if you can add a little bit of land behind the sea wall, that's a good idea.
So many designs include those land reclamations. - Building sea walls isn't new in Indonesia. It's it's a place where those kind of programs have happened previously. What's different here with President Subianto's plan is its scale and what he would hope is a definitive defense to protect that island. - So this place we're standing now is a reclaimed land. - This is Tiara Salsabila. She's a coastal engineer at Witteveen+Bos, and she's showing us different seawalls along Jakarta's coast.
Here in Kalibaru, where she was born and raised is a newer sea wall that allows for recreational use. - So, when I was a little girl, this dyke where we're standing now was not available yet. With this huge space, everything changed and I could see the change clearly from no space to a huge space for people to use for leisure. - But as we learned earlier, not all sea walls are the same. - So we are currently at Luar Batang area, and now I'm standing on the sea wall, the very thin sea wall. Here it is even not safe and there's no space. So yeah, it is very different. And then compared to the existing seawall in Kalibaru
this seawall is not strong at all. - When we think about Indonesia and its really unique geography, this collection of islands, you can understand why infrastructure projects are necessary. It needs bridges, ports, roads. But those projects have often also had another purpose. We've seen successive leaders promise lavish projects, big spending on major pieces of infrastructure as a way of commanding voter attention. - Of course, you could also simply relocate the entire capitol. No big deal. - What we've seen more recently is an acceleration of efforts to develop a new capitol city.
Nusantara is intended to provide a new capitol for Indonesia that's free from those challenges that Jakarta faces. - Nusantara would be an entirely new city built from scratch meant to avoid the threat of coastal flooding altogether. Former Indonesian president, Joko Widodo struggled to finance this project in the final years of his term. An effort that current president, Prabowo Subianto, has taken on in addition to the new seawall. - The Nusantara project right now, the official estimate is for $29 billion. The expectation though, is that it'll cost a lot more than that.
- Sounds a lot like another mega project hampered by high expenses, doesn't it? - There are still many options on the table for a seawall, and I wouldn't be able to put a bet on which design at this moment is a preferred design. - Over the past three decades, there's been at least 25 iterations of this new seawall like this one in the shape of the eagle-like demigod Goruda. - The idea was this would be the new capitol of Indonesia with the presidential palaces and the ministerial offices. - But in the end, this design was considered too ambitious. But even if Jakarta manages to complete its never-ending sea wall project,
the island capitol will continue to sink. Jakarta's problem isn't just the rising sea, it's also the extraction of groundwater. - Traditionally, Jakarta's would pump up their own water from the underground. It was clean, it was available, and it was for free. - But over time, more and more pumping has meant that the ground above sinks a process called "land subsidence" and as long as the government doesn't efficiently address the issue by providing reliable, fresh water alternatives, sinking will continue.
- Indonesia simply can't spend on climate-proofing projects in the same way that we'd see in a developed economy like Japan. It's trying to boost growth, trying to handle things like high youth unemployment. It's in a very different position to be able to fund climate proofing projects. - When it comes to adaptation, governments have to take many economic and social factors into consideration, and the cost can be hard to swallow.
- It's not always the case that the big expensive infrastructure projects deliver the best results. There are certainly instances where smaller projects, restoring wetlands, for example, can help mitigate the impacts of floods even better than maybe a huge seawall project. - Take "sponge cities," green spaces within urban landscapes that absorb water by capturing and storing rainwater and reducing runoff. They began in China and have popped up across the globe. Inexpensive solutions like this are not only effective, but easily replicable across cities around the world. But affordable flood solutions don't stop there.
Sometimes what it takes is really thinking outside the box, like in Nairobi, Kenya, where there's something new buzzing. - That is a pupa. Little pupa. When I first learned about black soldier fly farming, I thought it was a godsend for the waste problems that urban areas have. - Godsend might not be the first thing that comes to mind, but stay with me here. Nairobi is a global hub. Driven by migration, it's expected to double its population of 5 million by 2050. And more than half the residents live in informal
settlements where infrastructure lags far behind that rapid growth. Mukuru is among the largest - Flash floods are a common occurrence in this region. A major cause is we do not have proper channels for drainage, and often the few drains that are available are blocked by garbage. - Like many informal settlements in Nairobi, Mukuru has no regular waste collection. Enter. the flies. So the project begins with young people moving from door to door to collect household waste so that it does not end up on the street.
They then segregate this waste and the recyclables are then sold. What remains mostly is the organic waste, which they then bring to their black soldier fly unit. They shred it and they put it in crates. They then inoculate the crates with the eggs of the black soldier fly. - Larvae break down organic waste rapidly, preventing it from piling up in dumps or drains. Black soldier flies are great decomposers. They're detritivores, meaning they consume dead and decaying organic material.
- So they have two options. They can either take the larva and sell it as animal feed, or keep it a little longer, and then it grows into adulthood. It becomes a black soldier fly, and then it lays new eggs and the cycle begins. The total cost of this project is around 10 million shillings. - That's about 78,000 U.S. dollars. Over 1 billion people worldwide live in informal settlements similar to Mukuru. The results of this project could lead the way in raising armies of insects elsewhere.
- The protein that is used for animal feeds has become very expensive. So the black soldier fly provides an alternative source of protein. So through this, we are able to create a circular economy that turns a problem into a solution. - So sometimes adapting to floods doesn't take a giant wall or tunnel, just. the right bug in the right place. The black soldier fly project, just like Jakarta's mega seawall, won't stop flooding in the region alone, but it may help keep communities on firm enough economic ground to plan for the next adaptation.
- Throughout history, humans have tried to master water change, river flows, irrigate fields to build up economies and develop societies. The challenge now is to tame water flows to help protect cities, to help protect the planet from the impacts of climate change. - But adaptation is not mitigation. While these projects can help protect cities from disasters, they don't actually stop the ongoing environmental crisis. And sometimes, adaptation is not enough, especially for small and vulnerable nations like Jamaica,
which was devastated by Hurricane Melissa. A Category 5 reminder that more needs to be done. About $300 billion more. - Adaptation is what people are saying we're gonna have to do as a result of all those greenhouse gases going into the air. And to be clear, even if we stop today, we are going to warm substantially and live with the consequences. So we need to do both mitigation and adaptation. - When you wear a seatbelt, you drive faster or you're encouraged to bike faster than you should by the false security of the bike helmet. That's moral hazard.
Okay, back to climate. When we introduce this specter of weight, we can just adapt. We can just build seawalls. We may not need to cut CO2 emissions that much that quickly after all. Not true. So the trick, of course, is to use the need to adapt to then also motivate us to cut emissions more.
