Venice and Dhaka: Cities on the Brink, Half a Planet Apart
Sunday, October 28, 2007 / KW
As fate would have it, during 2007, my wife Mary-Jo and I visited two of the world's more unusual cities: Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and Venice, Italy.In some ways, the cities are as different as can be. Dhaka is terribly poor, a city of 13 million that has experienced out-of-control growth in recent decades as impoverished farmers flee the South Asian countryside in search of work, filling hastily-built tenement apartments and straining the city's already overtaxed infrastructure past the breaking point. (There are obvious analogies to Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Jakarta, and many other cities in the developing world.)
By contrast, Venice is a little jewel of a city, a tourist mecca steeped in history and filled with museums, churches, palaces, and other mementos from an era when the city was one of the richest and most powerful in Europe. Visitors flock to Venice's luxury hotels, its world-class restaurants, its famous arts festivals (such as the Biennale, which Mary-Jo and I attended), and its narrow cobblestone streets lined with designer shops--Fendi, Gucci, Armani, etc. etc.
Yet Dhaka and Venice have one big thing in common: Both are low-lying coastal cities that have long suffered from periodic flooding and are now threatened with massive destruction due to rising sea levels associated with climate change. As such, they represent the bleeding edge of a problem that will ultimately impact billions of people. With over 60 percent of the world's population living within 100 km of its seacoasts, the problems faced by these two cities will eventually threaten most of us.
And it is sobering to see how difficult those problems are to solve--not only for the people of Dhaka, who live in one of the poorest and least-cared-for nations of the world, but even for the relatively wealthy citizens of Venice, recognized the world over as one of civilization's great cultural treasures.
You've probably heard about the so-called MOSE (Moses) system, an enormous series of mobile floodgates designed to protect Venice from the effects of higher-than-normal tides by sealing off the city's famous lagoon from the rising waters of the Adriatic Sea. (The system has been described and explained in a number of television documentaries that have been seen the world over.) One of history's most massive engineering projects, including 78 movable steel gates, each 65 feet wide, 60 to 90 feet long, and 15 feet thick, MOSE is actually under construction and is scheduled for completion in 2011.
Yet already, just four years after the launch of the costly, controversial project, many environmentalists--including the mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari--are saying that the plan may already have been rendered obsolete by the accelerating pace of global climate change:
Sea levels are set to rise too high because of global warming, Cacciari said, making the system under construction "useless".
"On the basis of the precautionary principle we have to assume the most pessimistic figure, 50-60 cm above the average sea level in the next few decades," Cacciari said.
Therefore, he said, Moses was irrelevant because "you're still going to be too low".
If predicted levels of ocean rise take place, the MOSE system may prove to be merely a temporary stopgap rather than a lasting solution to Venice's environmental problems. And by altering the age-old relationship between Venice and sea, it may well produce new problems:
This stall tactic could come at a high price, explains biologist Richard Gersberg of San Diego State University. Closing the barriers could complicate the city's precarious sewage situation and cause health problems. Venice lacks modern sewage, relying instead on tides to flush wastes from the canals into the Adriatic Sea.
"There's a concern that, when the barriers come up, then that flushing will be cut off," says Gersberg. "MOSE gates, from what I've read, are supposed to be closed for only a short time. But is sea level going to cooperate with that theory? My best guess is, no."
You see the danger: If global warming drives water levels in the Adriatic much higher, the flood tides that MOSE is designed to stop may occur year-round rather than once every year or two. And if, in response, the water gates end up being shut permanently rather than just for brief periods, the disappearance of the traditional tidal pressures that formerly cleaned out the lagoon could turn the waters surrounding Venice's 118 small islands into a stew of toxic wastes. A gigantic new sewage treatment system would be required--and that, of course, would still not address the fact that the rising sea waters are likely to overpower the protection provided by MOSE.
Local officials are frantically studying ideas that might complement MOSE. One Italian company claims it could use hydaulic pumps to raise the level of buildings in the city by at least a meter. Would it work? Who knows? At this point we are obviously in the realm of untried technologies that may need to be deployed in hopes of saving an absolutely unique human resource. There's only one Venice, and once it is gone it is gone forever.
Of course, much the same can be said about a lot of other things that are threatened by current environmental crises, from endangered animal species like the tiger and the polar bear to the Great Barrier Reef to the city of Dhaka and the tens of millions of Bangladeshis whose homes and farms could be inundated permanently as a result of global warming.
As for Dhaka, its plight has not generated the same level of worldwide interest as that of Venice. So far, programs to alleviate the environmental threat to Bangladesh are limited to things like planting coastlines with mangrove trees in an effort to limit erosion. It's safe to say that $4.5 billion tidal floodgate systems are not in the cards . . . even though the human toll from an inundation of Dhaka would be far worse than if the same catastrophe were to strike Venice.
What does it all mean for the business managers who are the primary readers of this blog? Not much, directly. There's relatively little that an individual corporation can do to protect either Venice or Dhaka from the effects of global warming. The growing dangers to the world's coastlines clearly constitute a problem that is too big for private enterprise alone to solve. Even individual national governments lack the resources to address this challenge. Only international cooperation backed by a serious financial commitment has chance of reversing the dangerous trends.
But the story certainly underscores the growing urgency of the environmental initiatives that more and more businesses are undertaking, especially in the area of reducing carbon emissions. And while there's a dangerous disconnect between the responsibility we all share for the problem and the immediate impact of the suffering, perhaps thinking about the costs our world may have to pay can help us remain focused.
Local officials are frantically studying ideas that might complement MOSE. One Italian company claims it could use hydaulic pumps to raise the level of buildings in the city by at least a meter. Would it work? Who knows? At this point we are obviously in the realm of untried technologies that may need to be deployed in hopes of saving an absolutely unique human resource. There's only one Venice, and once it is gone it is gone forever.
Of course, much the same can be said about a lot of other things that are threatened by current environmental crises, from endangered animal species like the tiger and the polar bear to the Great Barrier Reef to the city of Dhaka and the tens of millions of Bangladeshis whose homes and farms could be inundated permanently as a result of global warming.
As for Dhaka, its plight has not generated the same level of worldwide interest as that of Venice. So far, programs to alleviate the environmental threat to Bangladesh are limited to things like planting coastlines with mangrove trees in an effort to limit erosion. It's safe to say that $4.5 billion tidal floodgate systems are not in the cards . . . even though the human toll from an inundation of Dhaka would be far worse than if the same catastrophe were to strike Venice.
What does it all mean for the business managers who are the primary readers of this blog? Not much, directly. There's relatively little that an individual corporation can do to protect either Venice or Dhaka from the effects of global warming. The growing dangers to the world's coastlines clearly constitute a problem that is too big for private enterprise alone to solve. Even individual national governments lack the resources to address this challenge. Only international cooperation backed by a serious financial commitment has chance of reversing the dangerous trends.
But the story certainly underscores the growing urgency of the environmental initiatives that more and more businesses are undertaking, especially in the area of reducing carbon emissions. And while there's a dangerous disconnect between the responsibility we all share for the problem and the immediate impact of the suffering, perhaps thinking about the costs our world may have to pay can help us remain focused.
After all, do we really want our grandchildren to know that we could have done something to save what they will know as the Lost City of Venice--but chose not to?
Labels: Bangladesh, Climate and Carbon, Dhaka, MOSE, Venice, Water
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