Last winter the land in my forest contained snow that was frozen one day and when the next day was 20 degrees C, some 200 acres of snow melted in a day washing out the rural road adjacent to my property.  The township claimed that a beaver dam on my land had broken, when my neighbors say something else was amiss: a winter’s worth of snow melted in a day and the culvert couldn’t handle the volume of in a day.

It’s not just my personal concern: whether it is flooding into your home or flooding caused on your land insurance claims are going up thanks to climate change. Whether termed “climate change” or “extreme weather,” an increasingly unstable environment is damaging homes and other property at an accelerating pace faster than observed in decades.

“The magnitude of these risks grows for homeowners, insurers, lenders and investors across the country while solutions to the impending insurance crisis are lacking,” says Clifford Rossi, a risk management expert who has served in executive roles at the U.S. Treasury, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Citigroup and Washington Mutual.

“Just look at your own homeowner’s insurance renewal bill this year, on average the increase was 33% in DC, and with no viable solutions coming from the industry or government, homeowners are at the mercy of insurers—hoping their next letter from their insurer is neither a nonrenewal or an exorbitant premium increase,” adds Rossi, currently a professor of the practice and executive director of the Smith Enterprise Risk Consortium at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

“Piecemeal approaches are unlikely to provide a long-lasting solution,” he says. “And meanwhile, the rise in the frequency and severity of natural disasters has underscored a form of market failure that suggests a fully private solution will be unable to provide long-term premium stability and availability of homeowners insurance.”

Writing for Mortgage Banker Magazine, Rossi proposes a “nationwide solution” to “essentially a nationwide problem.”

He writes: That solution is the Federal Natural Hazard Insurance Corporation – a private-public approach to providing homeowners insurance across all natural hazards and states that would address myriad failures in today’s insurance market.

As a new, federally chartered government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), the Federal Natural Hazard Insurance Corporation (FNHIC) would carve out natural hazards from existing homeowners’ policies, offering a separate policy based on a property’s exposure to the specific natural hazards in that location.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) would be absorbed into this new GSE and form the basis for a broader set of insurable hazards to be incorporated into these policies.

Private carriers would continue to offer and underwrite a standard homeowners insurance policy for risks unrelated to natural hazards while the FNHIC’s policies would be distributed by a network of insurers as the NFIP’s program is today. To reduce the FNHIC’s loss exposure and allow insurers and reinsurers to participate in this market, Climate Risk Transfer Securities (CLRTs) would be sold to private investors at tiers commensurate with their risk appetites.

Necessarily, such a major overhaul of how homeowners insurance is priced and provided in the U.S. would have significant implications for all market participants and the process of passing a chartering bill that implements such a program would be financially, politically, and operationally challenging, to say the least.

However, examining the merits of this structure – and the challenges such a program would confront—requires an understanding of the issues driving the breakdown in the delivery of homeowners insurance today.

The post Your home owner insurance and liability from climate change appeared first on Green Prophet.

Extreme flooding in Dubai two months ago shows unprepared the UAE is for extreme weather events. Artificial islands, massive buildings like the Burj and malls without connection to stormwater pipes or sewage systems shows the lack of planning for the city, once a fishing village, that was built up in a frenetic pace in the last 20 years.

With runways that looked like the Great Lakes in Canada and malls and parking lots flooded, Dubai understands that it’s time to upgrade and has announced an $8 billion plan to build an extensive stormwater runoff system, following unprecedented floods that paralyzed the city two months ago.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler, announced the ambitious project on social media, highlighting its significance in addressing future climate challenges. Foreign workers, of which Dubai is plentiful, will be charged with building the massive infrastructure project. We hope human rights conditions and decent salaries will be part of the deal.

Dubai and the Middle East in general, especially Qatar, is known for exploiting foreign and migrant workers.

Set to be completed by 2033, with construction starting immediately, Dubai’s rainwater drainage network will cover all areas of Dubai and is designed to absorb more than 20 million cubic meters of water daily, enhancing the UAE’s drainage capacity by 700 percent. This makes it the largest project of its kind in the region. Will the rainwater be put to use or will it just go down the drain? Rainwater is important for replenishing aquifers and staving off desertification. Perhaps it could be channeled to planting trees in the city to reduce the daily temperatures and which will also improve extreme flooding events in the case of high levels of precipitation.

The announcement comes in the wake of record-breaking rains that hit the UAE on April 16, leading to widespread flooding. The deluge, the heaviest in 75 years since records started resulted in the deaths of at least four people and caused significant disruptions, including at Dubai International Airport which was washed out.

Global warming, driven by fossil fuel emissions, is believed to have intensified these rains. The severe weather also affected neighboring Oman, where 21 people lost their lives.

In other weather-related events between the 14 and 19 June 2024, at least 1,301 people on the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca died due to extreme heat, with temperatures exceeding 50 °C, making it one of the deadliest Hajj to date.

This new infrastructure plan in Dubai aims to prepare the city for future climate events, ensuring the city remains resilient in uncertain uncertain conditions.

Thinking about a trip to Dubai? Have a technology to offer them that could help with stormwater runoff? Start here.

Burj built without thinking where the poop would go

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After a long dry spell last autumn and winter, Afghanistan and its neighboring Middle East countries have been witnessing unusually heavy rains and snowfall this year. In recent news, about 35 people are presumed dead from flooding in Afghanistan.

This comes less than a few weeks after the United Arab Emirates and Oman were flooded. According to the Emirati National Center for Meteorology, this April’s rain was the heaviest rainfall recorded in 75 years. Mid-April, more than a year’s worth of rain fell in a day on the Arabian Peninsula, one of the world’s driest regions.

Some suggest that ongoing experiments in cloud seeding is the reason for the freak weather. Others note that it’s a bigger experiment than that: human-made climate change.

From April 14 to 15 this year, the United Arab Emirates and northern parts of Oman say the rainfall accounted for at least 20 fatalities in Oman and four in the UAE.

Israel also clocked the hottest temperatures on record in April, at 40 degrees C beating a 30-year record. According to research from the University of Roehampton in England, the human body may lose the ability to rid of excessive heat and stop functioning optimally when outside temperatures reach beyond 40 degrees Celsius (104 F).

Afghanistan, run by the Taliban, is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. As climate change affects water, farming, food –– we will see more unrest and terror –– exactly what happened in Syria during its civil war period. About 580,000 people died in Syria as a result of water insecurity, food insecurity, with millions more as displaced as refugees in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Europe and Canada.

Syrians are currently under the thumb of a cruel dictator Basher Al-Assad and his British-born private-school educated wife Asma Al-Assad. The Syrian economy runs on drug money.

Why Afghanistan is especially vulnerable to climate change

1. Water Scarcity: Afghanistan heavily relies on snowmelt and rainfall for its water supply, particularly for irrigation in agriculture, which sustains the livelihoods of a significant portion of the population. However, changing precipitation patterns and the melting of glaciers due to rising temperatures are leading to reduced water availability, exacerbating existing water scarcity issues.
2. Droughts and Floods: Erratic rainfall patterns have intensified the frequency and severity of droughts and floods in Afghanistan. Prolonged droughts devastate agricultural output, exacerbate food insecurity, and drive rural communities into poverty. Intense rainfall events trigger flash floods, destroying infrastructure, homes, and crops, and displacing thousands of people annually.
3. Displacement and Conflict: The intersection of climate change impacts with existing socio-political challenges further compounds Afghanistan’s vulnerability. Displacement driven by climate-induced disasters strains already fragile social systems, exacerbates resource competition, and can fuel conflict over dwindling water and arable land, perpetuating a cycle of instability and insecurity.

If we don’t want to see more mass migrations from the Middle East to Europe and North America, we as people of the world need to help find solutions to those in vulnerable, dry lands in the Middle East and Africa. People will have no choice but to flee to cooler, more prosperous lands.

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Seizing dams is a proven tactic used to gain control in warfare; the Mosul Dam gives ISIS the ability to cut electrical power or flood cities located along the Tigris River. It could prove a turning point in Iraq’s mounting civil war, a significant step towards toppling the Shi’ite government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

“If you control the Mosul Dam, you can threaten just about everybody,” Daniel Pipes, President of the Middle East Forum told CNN. He added that ISIS now has the potential to create a massive flood that would not only cause local death and destruction, but also extend 30 miles to Mosul and over 280 miles to Baghdad.

According to Al Arabiya news, ISIS has warned residents in nearby villages along the Syrian border to leave their homes, hinting at a planned assault.

The humanitarian situation of civilians is reported as dire, and they are in urgent need of basic items including food, water and medicine. If floods happen, conditions will rapidly deteriorate, ushering in monumental public health and environmental challenges to this already beleaguered region.

Since thousands of Iraqi soldiers fled ISIS offensives, Shi’ite militias and Kurdish fighters have providing a critical line of defense, but recent losses have shown Kurdish fighters to be ineffective, placing increased pressure on Iraqi leaders to form a power-sharing government capable of countering the Islamic State.

Using social media to promote and propagandize their actions, ISIS tweeted its intention to open the borderline between Ninawa and Dohuk provinces, a linking to a statement which said, “The Islamic Caliphate legions have launched operations towards the northwestern regions…God facilitated for the mujahedeen to break into many important areas controlled by the Kurdish gangs and secular militias.”

With a growing reputation for performing public executions, crucifixions and beheadings as it works its way through towns and villages populated by vulnerable minorities, ISIS is “a dire threat to all Iraqis, the entire region, and the international community,” US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.

The group – which seeks to create an Islamic caliphate that encompasses both Iraq and Syria – is considered the biggest threat to the stability of Iraq since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein.

Image of Mosul Dam from BBC/AFP

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Inside each aquarium is a performer acting out everyday behavior, soon rendered impossible by the deluge. It’s performance art that viscerally connects the long-term patterns of climate change to our everyday lives. Lars Jan of art lab Early Morning Opera has worked for three years with a  team of scientists, artists and engineers (including experts from Columbia University’s Earth Institute) to bring the concept to reality. The aquarium’s scale presents enormous challenges in terms of safety systems and procedures; testing the behavior of a mass quantity of rushing water and proving associated power requirements requires a fully functional aquarium.

Jan is hoping that his crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter will raise necessary funds to complete the first glass box.  He raised enough money to cover design and development, and half the cost needed for construction. Now he must raise another $41,000 to complete fabrication, or the project will miss it’s October debut at the Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival, an all-night festival that is one of the largest art events in North America.

If all goes to plan, it next moves to Sarasota, Florida (a Gulf-side city predicted to be underwater in 20 years) for a stint at the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in March 2015.

Exhibitions with institutions in other cities are under discussion. Hopefully it also heads to Casablanca, Tunis and Alexandria before those cities succumb to the sea.

Jan, a 2013 TED fellow, believes that our relationship to water will become the central issue of the 21st century, and maintains that “art can be a powerful vehicle for communicating the complex phenomenon of climate change to a broad audience”.

The project has powerhouse support, with grants from the US National Endowment of the Arts, awards from the Rockefeller MAP Fund, New York State Council on the Arts, Panta Rhea Foundation, Awesome Without Borders, and individual donors.

Want to jump into Jan’s pool of supporters? Kickstarter donors can receive T-shirts, postcards, limited edition prints of the project  or a recorded “harmonic chant of gratitude” – see link here for details. Follow its progress on the Facebook or Twitter sites for Early Morning Opera. 

All images from Early Morning Opera.

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Just when the weather was cooling down in the Middle East a little, we get woke up again with the usual alarm and this time from a United Nations panel: humankind is to blame for global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns in a new report just out. Rising temperatures could have devastating effects on our people and planet as the risk carries with it new heat waves, floods, and drought. If you weren’t convinced before the 95 percent certainty of the UN group was issued, now is your time to wake up and take action.

The group came to its conclusions behind closed doors, as the 195 UN member states summed up their report – a mammoth 1,000 plus page document. Prospects for our planet in peril are even more dire than what was predicted by the group back in 2007.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as IPCC, says it is 95 percent certain that mankind caused more than half the warming observed over the past 60 years.

Our human existence and material needs produce amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) which goes on to heat up the atmosphere.

What’s the deal? Well if you haven’t heard already, sea levels are expected to rise, but now at a faster pace. See this little art project to imagine what will happen. We have a report on what’s expected for North Africa. And based on what we have read, cities like Alexandria are most certainly at immediate risk.  By 2100 the sea levels are expected to rise between 26 and 82 centimeters – that’s almost a whole meter!

“We know much more about the reasons for rising sea levels now than we did a couple years ago,” said climate researcher Stefan Ramstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “Measurements show that both large continental ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic are increasingly losing ice masses.”

It is the group’s fifth assessment report on climate change.

Meanwhile global warming will continue.

They write in the report: “Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years.”

“To steer humanity out of the high danger zone, governments must step up immediate climate action and craft an agreement in 2015 that helps to scale up” efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, said.

We’ve already being seeing freaky weather patterns around the world as our planet revolts against the effects of increased CO2.

“The atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. CO2 concentrations have increased by 40% since pre-industrial times, primarily from fossil fuel emissions and secondarily from net land use change emissions. The ocean has absorbed about 30% of the emitted anthropogenic carbon dioxide, causing ocean acidification,” the report elucidates.

Over all we can expect that humid regions will get more rain while dry regions, like in the Middle East, will get even less water. Shit. Not a great forecast for us.

If you are keen on reading the summary report to push it into the faces of your local governments, find it online here (links to PDF). The IPCC is located here. The almost two hour meeting can be seen in a recorded webcast format here.

The post UN Blames People for Global Warming, Warns of Dire Consequences appeared first on Green Prophet.

Perhaps timid is not the right word. Squeamish is better.

Fox News and CNN have both failed to provide balanced climate change coverage, according to Media Matters, mostly because of political wrangling.

But Al Jazeera America, launched 20 August, 2013, has no such qualms.

“Al Jazeera America’s 30 minutes of climate coverage (about 24 minutes not including commercial breaks) represented nearly half of what was seen on all network nightly news programs in 2012, and more than what was featured by CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront and Anderson Cooper 360 and Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity combined in the past four and a half months,” writes Media Matters.

The segment aired during Tuesday’s edition of Inside Story, according to the paper, and promises to usher in a refreshing new era of balanced, science-based environmental journalism.

Dr. Heidi Cullen, Vice President and Chief Climatologist for Climate Central — a non-profit science journalism organization headquartered in Princeton, NJ, was one of the show’s first guests.

She said it is essential to come to terms with climate change and the fact that we are both the cause of and solution to manmade global warming. Instead of inciting political drama, the show focused on the inevitable consequences of climate change – including fiercer ecological crisis such as drought, storms, and rising sea levels.

A director competitor to the news outlets that have helped to fuel America’s great left/right divide, Al Jazeera aims to be a pioneer in straightforward climate change coverage – even focusing occasionally on solutions in order to hopefully catalyze positive, proactive action, and they’re not shy about criticizing news outlets that don’t.

Media Matters reports:

“Over the past ten years,” said Michael Mann, the director of the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State, “[special interests] have literally spent hundred of millions of dollars in a major disinformation campaign—a campaign aimed at confusing the public.”

Per capita, Qatar ranks among the world’s worst polluters, and parts of the small emirate, which hosted COP 18, are also deeply vulnerable to rising seas.

For more details, head over to Media Matters.

Image of flooded house via Shutterstock 

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Think “Mediterranean” and most Westerners conjure up Monte Carlo or Mykonos, Cannes or Nice, often overlooking the southern coastline cities that lie in Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Fourteen Mediterranean port cities are at risk of extreme and repetitive flooding due to climate change, soils erosion, spikes in population and urban sprawl, according to a Program for the Prevention Preparedness and Response to Natural and Man-Made Disasters (PPRD South) report.  According to ANSAmed, PPRD’s top eight cities-at-risk all boast Middle Eastern zip codes: Alexandria holds top risk, followed by Istanbul, Benghazi, Casablanca, Smyrna, Algiers, Rabat, and Beirut.

European cities of Marseille-Aix-en-Provence, Barcelona, Tripoli, Athens and Naples bring up the rear of the riskiest waterfronts, but we head back to the MidEast for the finale – roll up your pant legs, Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

The World Bank offers a bleaker prediction, stating rising sea level could affect 43 port cities: 24 in the Middle East and 19 in North Africa. It ventures that  a 0.5 meter rise near Alexandria would displace more than 2 million people, with $35 billion in losses in land, property, and infrastructure, as well as incalculable losses of cultural assets.

Rising sea levels and temperatures are predicted to incite increased storms, putting these coastal cities at high risk of experiencing extreme “hundred year floods” (floods of such severity that scientists would estimate them occurring only once in any given century).

The PPRD report, which was commissioned by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, warned that rapid urbanization will see populations in these cities tripling by 2070.

The Mediterranean Sea is increasingly at risk on every level: 30% of the world’s cargo ships sail it, including 25% of the global oil tanker fleet. Millions of people depend upon this waterbody for their livelihoods.

Last week in Calabria, Italy, a one-day conference entitled The Future of Mediterranean Economies and the Promise of Green Economy was held to discuss this subject along with a broader agenda of sustainable development in the Mediterranean region. Experts joined together to devise ways to reduce man-made wastes, switch fossil-fuel based economies to ones based on renewable energy, and introduce sustainable development in the poorest coastal areas.

Good stuff, but we need to widen the focus on this looming dilemma: this trickle of attentiveness won’t stem rising tides.

Image of flooded pyramids by Shutterstock

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When you click around NASA’s online flood maps you can instantly view impacts on the world’s coastal communities. A single meter increase soaks Alexandria and Basra, and rattles the nerves of eastern Saudi shores. Jump sea levels 20 meters and Bahrain becomes an atoll, southern Iraq is submerged, and all of Cairo becomes beachfront property.

Primo guidance for dealing with a global warming apocalypse came in the 2nd best fortune cookie I ever opened: Hope for the Best, but Expect the Worst.

Water is the new frontier.  We chart new territory determining how to preserve potable supplies and prevent catastrophies caused by severe weather and resultant flooding. As an architect, I’m drawn to the latter dilemma. I trainspot new schemes to protect our built environment.

Overpopulation in our cities means more building and paving. There’s less landscape to absorb rainfall, and poorly planned development can inadvertently channel water to drainage system pinch-points, causing localized flooding with unanticipated results.

I was sideline-involved in a brilliant project led by Dublin City Council (DCC): a 4-year pilot to render Dublin a “flood resistant city”. DCC partnered with local authorities in eight European cities, pooling talents to prevent both pluvial (rain) and fluvial (waterbody) flood events in urban settings. That EU-funded program focused on northwestern Europe, but their techniques are transferrable to coastal and urban places worldwide.

One specific concept was to capitalize on existing urban infrastructure. Instead of wrapping coastal dykes around town, integrate new protective barriers into what’s already built.  Beef up street curbs and property walls; shore up the banks of local waterways. Expand on what exists so that, in a major flood event, roads would act as rivers and sidewalks as streams.  These multi-functional hardscapes could channel flood waters to the city’s storm water drainage system, which would be adapted for higher capacity. A civil engineering version of the WWII credo “Make Do and Mend”.  Good stuff.

Shortly after I left Ireland, a freak weather event teamed up with a storm surge to cause biblical flooding throughout Dublin.  I figured friends’ stories were a bit of the Blarney until one sent me this link to amateur footage of city-wide effects.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAozRKfTXjQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

For obvious reasons, Irish and UK hydrogeologists and civil engineers are fronting some of the most innovative flood protection. UK flood specialists BACA Architects made a recent splash with their amphibious house.

An amphibious building follows the basic concept of a fixed dock. It’s tied to the ground via static structural foundations with sliding components.  When tide movements or flooding occurs, the entire structure rises up along its fixed underpinning and floats in stable position, buoyed by the floodwater.   It resumes normal setting when the waters recede.

The house acts as a free-floating pontoon. The upper levels of the BACA house is constructed from lightweight timber. Its concrete basement sits inside a “wet dock”, essentially a pocket consisting of four retaining walls on a base slab.

The pocket acts as a bathtub, filling with water allowing the building to float like a child’s tub toy. A terraced garden ringing the property will help manage run-off when water levels start to subside.

The house, the UK’s first amphibious building, was recently awarded planning permission for construction on a island on the River Thames in Marlow, a tiny town about 35 miles west of London.

Maybe a bit goofball.  Personally, I’d rather live in a houseboat than in a house that acts as a boat, but amphibious design can be a remedy for communities susceptible to radical rises in sea level and associated waterbodies: think monsoons, hurricanes, extremes in seasonal tides.

Rainsoaked northern nations are focused on flood-proofing their cities.  Coastal communities in arid climates are more likely to be caught off guard by rising seas.  Recall my stale cookie: make the message more relevant.  Pray for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

Green Prophet will continue to report on a host of solutions that can enable us to adapt safely to the challenges of climate change.

Image of amphibious house by BACA Architects. Top image via flood maps.

The post Play God With NASA’s Flood Maps appeared first on Green Prophet.

The Malacca Straits Mosque in Malaysia is arguably the world’s most beautiful and it is vulnerable to rising seas.

Malaysia is one of the few countries that share Dubai’s obsession with manmade islands and grandeur. We have often cast a critical eye on the Emirate’s core developers for building artificial islands that have wrecked havoc on the Gulf’s marine environment, but the danger doesn’t end there.

As increasing levels of greenhouse gases choke the planet and giant plumes of methane fast-track global warming, glaciers and ice caps melt, leaving all low-lying and coastal developments vulnerable to rising sea levels. Take a look at the beautiful Malacca Straits Mosque in Malaysia. It was propped up on concrete pillars, but how will it fare in a few decades when the Strait of Malacca is one meter higher?

Monitoring sea levels

One of the most important shipping lanes in the world, the Strait of Malacca is particularly vulnerable to climate change. The Malay Government has long known this. Even during colonial times, tidal stations were set up to monitor sea levels in the country.

According to the Sea Level Monitoring Network, “there are 12 tidal stations along the coast of Peninsular Malaysia (West Malaysia) and 9 tidal stations along the coast of Sabah and Sarawak (East Malaysia).”

But this hasn’t stopped such improbable developments as the Malacaa Island – the first “Twin Island City Center” – on which southern shore the Malacca Straits Mosque was built.

The hubris of humanity

Undertaken by Pulau Kembar Sdn Bhd. – a 98.999%-owned subsidiary of Talam – the project involved the reclamation of two artificial islands off the coast of Malacca measuring 40ha and 50ha respectively. Although an impressive engineering feat, we know by now that such construction hinders natural currents and drums up silt, which in turn disturbs marine habitats.

The Mosque was completed towards the end of 2006 and cost US$3.3 million. Although there’s nothing at all green about it, it would be a shame to see such a beautiful building swallowed up by water. But there’s a strong chance of this.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “global warming from the greenhouse effect could raise sea level one meter about one meter in the next century and several meters in the next few hundred years by expanding ocean water, melting mountain glaciers, and causing ice sheets to melt or slide into the oceans.”

This rise would ” inundate deltas, coral atoll islands, and other coastal lowlands, erode beaches, exacerbate coastal flooding, and threaten water quality in estuaries and aquifers.”

Inundated with water

The Welt Atlas map above shows the extent to which Malaysia is surrounded by water. In 1992, the non-government Malaysian Climate Change Group (MCCG) was established to draw attention to the country’s susceptibility to rising seas and other environmental issues.

In response, the government established the Ninth Malaysia plan 2006-2010) that establishes mechanisms to mitigate climate change issues. Science Alert lists some of the plans priorities:

• Conduct Coastal Vulnerability Index (CVI) study;
• Implement Coastline Protection Program
• Develop Integrated Coastal Zone Management
• Implement Flood Mitigation Program
• Identify the Relationship Between Climate Change and Vector-Borne Diseases

Climate change is no secret. We understand the dangers. But our denial jeopardizes all of our hard work – our beautiful works of architecture – and other important achievements. What will it take for us to change?

:: We discovered the second beautiful image of the Malacca Mosque on Urban Peek’s Facebook page.

More on Artificial Islands and Architecture on Green Prophet:

Israel Considers Building an Artificial Island off the Coast of Gaza

 Dutch Company Floats New Idea for World Island Investors in Dubai

Trouble in Paradise: Water Failure at Luxury Apartments in Dubai

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