The port city of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, is investing in a number of new innovations aimed at combating the effects of climate change.
Director of Rotterdam Climate Change, Wiert-Jan de Raaf, told SBS the city was at risk.
“Rotterdam is very vulnerable to climate change because it is in a very low-lying delta,” he said. “In fact, 80 per cent of the city is below sea level, transporting all the water from the Alps and all the rain from Europe to the sea.”
Lined by 45 kilometres of refineries, the port is aiming for an 80 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
“The era of fossil fuels will be ending in the next decades – 20, 30 or maybe 70, 80 years - and from next year, petrol cars built before 1992 – and diesel models built before 2001 – will be banned from the city centre,” Mr de Raaf said.
“At this moment 60,000 households are getting industrial waste heat to heat their houses. In the next 10 years that will grow to 150,000 households.”
Concrete is being ripped up and replaced with purpose-built absorption gardens as town planners try to cope with increasingly volatile storm surges.
Bart Peters of the City of Rotterdam said the constructions served a dual purpose.
“That’s why we built this water square here,” he said. “It serves as an arena or as a daytime playground and when there’s heavy rainfall it fills up with water - up to 1.7 million litres - which equals 8,500 bathtubs. When the rain stops we let it flow towards one of the canals.”
In June, a court found the Dutch government had also fallen behind on its goals under the Kyoto protocol on carbon emissions and ordered it to cut output by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 - a more ambitious target than the 17 percent Rutte's government had been following.
Several studies have attributed the Dutch shortfall to erratic subsidy policies in 2006-2013 and a lack of spending on renewables.
“The Netherlands is only a small country so it’s very important that all the countries in the world work on these issues because climate change is a global problem,” Mr de Raaf said.
- with Reuters
