Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads, the show where we pull on
the most fascinating and sometimes terrifying threads of global knowledge
and unpack them for you.
Speaker 2: Today, we are staring down a timeline that feels frankly,
less like a century long climate projection and more like
an uncomfortably specific deadline.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it really does. We're talking about the year twenty
fifty exactly, and our source material for this deep dive
focuses on a pretty unnerving premise. Why are so many
of the world's largest, most vital coastal cities facing this
existential crisis right now?
Speaker 3: And why twenty fifty? Why that specific date.
Speaker 1: Right We often think about the thread as something external,
you know, rising oceans, melting ice caps, way off in
the distance. But the surreal reality for people in Maggie
these areas today is just so much more immediate. You
wake up, it's a beautiful clear day, no hurricane, no storm,
and the streets are flooded.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Our sources put as so simply. They say the ocean
is just pushing its way inland.
Speaker 2: That phrase, I think it just captures the shift perfectly
for Deck. Yes, the warning was always about this gradual
universal sea level rise, something.
Speaker 1: That would happen everywhere.
Speaker 2: Slowly exactly, but now the projections for several major cities
are incredibly localized and specific. The messages if nothing changes,
these places fail by twenty fifty.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is really to unpack that, to
get into the complex physics that the sources reveal. We
have to distinguish between that big global factor, the sea
level rise, and the localized land collapse the subsidence, which is,
and this is the key part, often entirely human made.
Speaker 3: That's the core of it.
Speaker 2: The story isn't just that the water is rising, it's
that the ground at the same time is falling, and
in some cases it's falling much much faster.
Speaker 1: We're basically looking for those surprising insights that explain why
a city built on say, soft river delta mud like
New Orleans face is a totally different but just as
urgent threat as a financial hub sitting on porous sponge
like rock like Miami.
Speaker 2: Or a massive city that literally and I mean literally
durraining itself dry like Jakarta. These local conditions, as you said,
they're the true accelerators of the crisis.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just abstract environmental news. I mean, this
is essential knowledge because we're talking about the foundations of
global infrastructure.
Speaker 2: Massive population centers, trillions of dollars in economic activity all
over the next twenty five years. We're analyzing why some
of the world's biggest cities are already below sea level
today and.
Speaker 1: What happens when the land sinks faster than the sea rises.
Understanding that dual dynamic, that's the key to the twenty
fifty line.
Speaker 2: Okay, So to start, we have to establish the primary
factor that is catastrophically amplifying the global sea level threat
for dozens.
Speaker 1: Of major cities, especially in Asia right.
Speaker 2: Especially across Asia. The thing is, for many of them,
it is not the rising ocean that is their biggest
enemy right now.
Speaker 1: It's the ground itself.
Speaker 2: It's the rapid, anthropogenic, so human caused collapse of the
ground beneath them. In several documented cases, the sources make
it crystal clear. The land is sinking faster than the
ocean is rising.
Speaker 1: That's a true dual calamity. The sea is coming up
and the city is simultaneously pulling itself down. And nothing
illustrates this better than Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. When
I read the figures on Jakarta, I mean I was
genuinely shocked by how immediate the problem is. It's not
a projection, No, this is measured data. It's showing the
ground in some neighborhoods is dropping by more than ten
inches per year annually, annually. I mean, can you just
picture that a foot of land, a foot of concrete
just sinking every single year. It's almost unbelievable rate of
land loss.
Speaker 2: It is an astronomical rate. And the mechanism behind it
is maybe the most sobering part of this whole story, because,
like we said, it's completely self inflicted, a side.
Speaker 1: Effect of failed infrastructure.
Speaker 2: Exactly. You have to understand a little bit about aquafer mechanics.
So Jakarta sits on this massive, deep basin of soft alluvial.
Speaker 3: Soil basically river sediment, river sediment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and underneath that soil are these vast aquifers, underground
reservoirs of water trapped in the rock and sediment.
Speaker 1: So the water is essentially holding up the ground above it.
It's like a structural support.
Speaker 3: It's the structural support.
Speaker 2: But for decades, because of this massive population boom and
a public water system that was unreliable, too expensive, or
just didn't exist in large parts.
Speaker 3: Of the city.
Speaker 1: People had to find their own water.
Speaker 2: They did, residents and businesses, they drilled their own private wells,
millions of them, and they pulled that water out from
those deep aquifers. And when you pull the water out,
the pressure that held the grains of sediment apart just
dissipates the weight of the city, all the buildings and
the concrete. It presses down, compacting and crushing those soft
clay layers.
Speaker 1: It's like squeezing the water out of a massive sponge.
That's the perfect analogy it is. And that compaction process,
over decades, repeated millions of times, resulted in the land
literally lapsing into the void.
Speaker 2: And that explains the ten inches per year. It is
a geological time bomb that was triggered by a failure
of public works.
Speaker 1: And the consequence is just staggering. I mean, the sources
point out that forty percent of Jakarta is already below
sea level. Right They've built and rebuilt flood walls taller, stronger,
but the ground underneath the wall just keeps dropping. The
ocean just finds a way.
Speaker 2: In you can see this grim history laid out in
the data. The two thousand and seven flooding.
Speaker 1: Four hundred thousand people displaced.
Speaker 2: Then in twenty thirteen, floodwaters reached the presidential palace.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's not some coastal district. That's a national
security issue.
Speaker 1: And then dozens killed in one of the worst floods
in twenty twenty. I mean, it seems fair to say
the government's failure to provide reliable pipe water is what
accelerated this to the point of no return.
Speaker 2: I think the sources absolutely support that conclusion. It's a
tragedy rooted in a socioeconomic problem that turned into a
geological crisis, and.
Speaker 1: That crisis ultimately led to what is I mean, it's
arguably the most dramatic urban response to this kind of
threat in modern history.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 2: The Indonesian government publicly acknowledged that parts of the city
will become permanently uninhabitable.
Speaker 1: They just admitted defeat.
Speaker 2: They did, and that's why they announced the plan to
move the national capital entirely. They're relocating the heart of
the nation to a brand new city called New Santara
on the island of Borneo.
Speaker 1: Just think about that for a second. That is an
unprecedented admission of vulnerability, a government choosing to spend what
potentially thirty five billion dollars a massive sum, to physically
move the seat of power the historical cultural political center
of the country, rather than fight a battle they know
they cannot win. By twenty fifty. That just sets the
stage for every other city we're going to talk about.
Speaker 3: It really does.
Speaker 2: So let's connect that case to others where the soft
soil plays a role, but maybe the dynamics are a
bit different.
Speaker 3: Let's look at Bangkok and Shanghai, Okay.
Speaker 1: So Bangkok it has a similar profile to Jakarta, at
least in the early stages, though maybe not quite as extreme.
It also sits on incredibly soft clay soil sometimes called
marine clay, and it's sinking for that same combination of reasons.
Historic groundwater extraction, though that is regulated now.
Speaker 2: And the sheer weight of its buildings, the non stop construction.
Speaker 1: Exactly Unlike Jakarta, Bangkok did try to implement pretty stringent
groundwater regulations and they have slowed the rate of subsidence
a lot.
Speaker 2: Which is a success story in its own way.
Speaker 1: It is, but the pressure is still immense because the
city's growth just continues, and the construction deep foundations, basement parking,
all of that adds this colossal weight to that yielding soil, and.
Speaker 2: The city is just so exposed geographically incredibly.
Speaker 1: The sources note that parts of the city are already
less than three feet above sea level. This is not
a city that needs a hurricane to cause a catastrophic problem.
Speaker 3: No, it's just a high tide.
Speaker 1: Just a slightly higher than average high tide, especially during
monsoon season. The stark warning is that by twenty fifty,
tidal flooding is going to become routine, even without major storms.
That makes huge parts of the city just well unusable
for days at a time.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about the catastrophic floods back in twenty eleven
that shut down global supply chains. That was driven by rainfall,
but it exposed that fundamental vulnerability it did so.
Speaker 3: When we contrast this.
Speaker 2: With Shanghai, we see a city that, because of really
intense and early regulation starting decades ago, has managed to
slow its subsidence dramatically from.
Speaker 1: Fee per decade to millimeters per year.
Speaker 2: Which shows what's possible with that kind of centralized action.
But Shanghai's sheer scale magnifies any remaining vulnerability. It's sitting
on soft sediment near the Yangsee River delta, with.
Speaker 1: Over twenty five million people.
Speaker 2: Twenty five million people and just colossal infrastructure right there
on the coast.
Speaker 1: So for Shanghai, the threat isn't so much constant sinking anymore.
It's more about threat amplification during extreme weather like typhoons exactly.
Speaker 2: The storm surges from typhoons are already severe and getting
more intense. When you combine that with even a small
increase in overall water levels, the consequences are disproportionately enormous.
Speaker 1: The city has invested heavily in defenses though, yeah, massive
coastal dykes floodgates they have.
Speaker 2: But the sources caution that the soft foundation, combined with
that sheer mass of humanity and steel, all sitting right
on the coast facing the Pacific, it means the safety
margin is continuously shrinking.
Speaker 1: So, even with the regulations, that underlying soil of vulnerability
means that when a big typhoon hits, the city is
just much more susceptible to catastrophic damage than a city
built on say, bedrock.
Speaker 2: The battle is constant, even if they've won that first
big fight against subsidence.
Speaker 1: That transition brings us directly to our next big point.
We need to shift the discussion to cities where geography
doesn't just make defenses difficult, it dictates the terms. It
renders standard flood defenses like a simple sea wall, almost useless.
Speaker 2: And this is where we have to talk about Miami.
Speaker 1: Miami its threat profile is completely different from Jakarta's.
Speaker 2: Completely Jakarta is sinking because it's draining its water table.
Miami is in trouble because it sits on something called
Kars topography, specifically porous limestone.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's really unpack that, because this is where the
physics gets so interesting. Kar's topography means the bedrock is
basically riddled with holes and cracks, right like.
Speaker 2: A sponge exactly, The limestone bedrock acts less like a
solid foundation and more like a colossal, rigid sponge or
Swiss cheese. Most coastal cities fight the ocean with a
vertical barrier, a concrete.
Speaker 1: Wall to keep the water out.
Speaker 2: To keep the water out, Miami can't rely on that
because the ocean water moves through the ground itself. Beneath
the wall around the wall via that porous limestone. It's
a hydraulic connection that a wall simply cannot break.
Speaker 1: And I find that mechanism so insidious because it just
bypasses all our traditional defenses. It's the exact reason for
that phenomenon they call sunny day flooding. You can build
the tallest sea wall you can imagine, but on a
high tide, the ocean level is higher than the city's
drainage level, so the water doesn't wait for a storm.
Speaker 2: It just pushes up up through the storm drains, through
cracks in the sidewalks, right through the foundations of low
lying buildings. The city floods on a clear day. It's
geology literally vetoing human engineering.
Speaker 1: There must be a constant maintenance nightmare too.
Speaker 2: It is because the water pushing up isn't just fresh water,
it's saltwater. So you get chronic saltwater intrusion, which contaminates.
Speaker 1: The fresh groundwater that people rely on.
Speaker 2: And it rapidly corrodes the subterranean infrastructure, pipes, electrical conduits,
road foundations.
Speaker 3: It eats them away from the inside out.
Speaker 1: And the data just confirms this is getting worse NOAA
data shows sea levels in South Florida have risen over
eight inches since nineteen fifty, and that's accelerating. Projections are
for another ten to seventeen inches by twenty fifty.
Speaker 2: And you might hear that and think, seventeen inches and
twenty five years, we.
Speaker 1: Can manage that, but not in Miami.
Speaker 2: Not in Miami's geological context, those seventeen inches are catastrophic.
The sources note that even a a few inches makes
neighborhoods unlivable.
Speaker 1: Why just because it increases the frequency that's sunny day
flooding exponentially.
Speaker 2: It shifts the high tide mark just enough to make
what used to be a rare nuisance a chronic, regular
intrusion that never fully drains away.
Speaker 1: So by twenty fifty, we're looking at large parts of
Miami Beach other low lying areas just experiencing chronic flooding,
not from storms, but from the daily tides.
Speaker 2: They're deploying massive pumps, they're raising roads, but those pumps
are fighting a rising water table that is constantly connected
to the ocean beneath the bedrock. It's a relentless structural challenge.
Speaker 1: It really is the difference between trying to keep water
out of a sealed barrel and trying to keep it
out of a basket made of stone.
Speaker 3: A perfect way to put it. So.
Speaker 2: If Miami is fighting porous rock, let's look at New Orleans,
which is fighting an equally difficult but geologically different battle
against soft delta sediment.
Speaker 1: New Orleans is the definition of a survival machine. It's
famous for its whole ecosystem of levees, pumps, flood walls.
Without them, much of the city would immediately.
Speaker 2: Flood because it sits almost entirely below sea level.
Speaker 1: Right It's built on delta sediment silt, sand clay deposited
by the Mississippi River over millennia, and that sediment naturally
compacts over time. The land is inherently designed to sink.
Speaker 2: But here's the double edged sword of human intervention. The
Mississippi River used to flood regularly, and when it did,
it would deposit fresh sediment across the delta.
Speaker 1: It was rebuilding the land.
Speaker 2: It was a dynamic, sustainable cycle. The river built the land,
and the land would slowly sink and the river would
build it up again.
Speaker 1: And for decades we've stopped that from happening.
Speaker 3: Precisely.
Speaker 2: Decades of intensive river control, These massive levees built to
prevent flooding and promote shipping, have prevented that fresh sediment
from reaching the delta. The ground continues to compact, but
nothing is there to rebuild it.
Speaker 1: The land is being starved.
Speaker 3: It's being starved.
Speaker 2: It's a compound failure of geology and our own infrastructure choices.
Speaker 1: So if the river is supposed to rebuild the delta,
why don't we just dredge the sediment that builds up
further north and I don't know, pipe it back down
into the wetlands. That seems like a logical engineering fix.
Speaker 2: And that's a critical question. Engineers have been working on
that for decades. They are attempting that through these massive,
multi billion dollar sediment diversion projects.
Speaker 1: But the scale is the issue.
Speaker 2: The scale is immense. The amount of sediment needed to
restore thousands of square miles of disappearing wetlands and counteract
the sinking is just enormous. Plus diverting it requires making
deliberate cuts in the levee system, which carries its own risks.
It's not a quick fix.
Speaker 1: And we all remember what happened when those defenses failed
during Hurricane Katrina in two thousand and five that was catastrophic.
Speaker 2: Eighty percent of the city flooded. Since then, billions have
been spent on upgrades, creating one of the most sophisticated
defense systems in the world.
Speaker 1: But the challenges just keep stacking up.
Speaker 3: They do.
Speaker 2: On top of the compaction, sea levels in the Gulf
of Mexico are rising faster than the global average, and critically,
those coastal wetlands, the natural storm buffers, they're disappearing at
an alarming.
Speaker 1: Rate, which exposes the city even more it does.
Speaker 2: The projection for twenty fifty is sobering. Without constant upgrades,
which require continuous funding and political will, parts of New
Orleans will face chronic flooding even without major hurricanes. The
city survival is entirely dependent on technology remaining operational two
hundred and four seven.
Speaker 1: It's a heroic but just exhausting race against geology, the sea,
and your own budget.
Speaker 3: It really is.
Speaker 1: It's one thing to see these newer cities built on
soft clay struggle with modern growth. It's another thing, entirely
to see ancient cities. Metropolis is built to last for millennia,
now succumbing to this rapid modern environmental change.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're talking about places where adaptation has worked for
a thousand years, but that historical limit has been reached.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Venice is the quintessential, just heartbreaking example of that.
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: It was founded over a thousand years ago on a
shallow lagoon, famously built on millions of wooden piles driven
into the sediment, and for most of its history it
survived through remarkable ingenuity and adaptation to the rhythm.
Speaker 3: Of the tides.
Speaker 1: But that rhythm, that timeline, it has accelerated past the
point of sustainability. The city floods during these high tide events,
called aqua alta. Historically, these were rare, spectacular occurrences.
Speaker 2: Part of the city's unique character. The sources remind us
that the massive nineteen sixty six flood was considered a
once in a century thing. Now similar floods happen multiple
times in a decade. The character of the city is
changing from one of romance to one of chronic crisis.
Speaker 1: That twenty nineteen event was particularly devastating. Water levels reached
nearly six feet above normal, flooding over eighty percent of
the city. Saint Mark's Square historic buildings.
Speaker 2: We saw permanent damage to centuries old structures, widespread electrical failures.
Speaker 3: The very fabric of the city was at risk.
Speaker 1: So the city responded with this massive, multi billion dollar project,
the may Dell Flood Barrier System.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible feat of engineering designed to physically block
the lagoon with these massive submerged gates that rise during
high tides.
Speaker 1: But it's not a permanent solution, is.
Speaker 2: It No, because it only addresses the external rising sea,
not the internal sinking land. Venice has its own subsidence issues,
and the most system has limits. You can't just use
it every day.
Speaker 1: Why not? If it works, why can't they just keep
it closed?
Speaker 2: That's the critical compromise. If you seal the lagoon too often,
you stop the natural tidal fleshing that's essential for cleaning
the water for the ecosystem. The lagoon becomes stagnant.
Speaker 4: An ecological choke hold, a different kind of disaster, And
the models show that by twenty fifty, sea level rise
combined with subsidence will mean they'd have to operate the
MOST systems so frequently that the cost, economic and ecological
become unsustainable.
Speaker 1: So even with the barriers frequent flooding becomes unavoidable.
Speaker 2: It does, and the chilling implication here is that parts
of Venice might still exist, but they'll function more like
aquarium than a city. They might have to permanently seal
off entire sections. It's a tragedy where the act of
preserving its past threatens its future as a living city.
Speaker 1: From the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, we find another historical
city facing a crisis that's less about sinking and more
about literal erosion. You can see happening today Alexandria.
Speaker 2: Egypt, founded over twenty three hundred years ago by Alexander
the Great, a crucial center for ancient empires. Today it's
one of the most threatened coastal cities in the entire
Middle East.
Speaker 1: A metropolis of over five million people.
Speaker 2: And the crisis isn't about projections a generation away. It's
happening right now. Satellite data shows parts of the coastline
are eroding rapidly, and the Nile Delta itself is sinking
for reasons similar to New Orleans. The Aswan High Dam
traps the silt up river.
Speaker 1: So we're seeing tangible immediate impacts. Widespread salt water intrusion,
damaging roads and buildings.
Speaker 2: Right, and the sources mentioned specific tanable losses. Recent storms
causing damage that wouldn't have happened decades ago, Collapsed cemeteries,
beaches that have just vanished. You can literally watch history
being washed into the sea.
Speaker 1: The Egyptian government has responded with concrete barriers, but that
can sometimes just push the problem down the coast accelerate
erosion elsewhere.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and as profound as that loss of heritage is,
we have to pivot to the immense human cost when
this environmental threat meets explosive population density, the population collision exactly,
This creates the potential for displacement on a terrifying global scale.
Speaker 1: Let's start with Manila in the Philippines. This city just
perfectly encapsulates that collision. It's one of the world's most
densely populated and flood prone.
Speaker 2: Cities, and just like Jakarta, the real local crisis is
the land disappearing from underneath the residence. It's a textbook
example of subsidence combined with population pressure.
Speaker 1: We see that groundwater extraction issue again, but just amplified
by this sheer density. Land has lef towered by several
feet over the past century.
Speaker 2: Which means coastal flooding reaches much further inland. It amplifies
the damage from every single typhoon, every heavy rain.
Speaker 1: And what does that mean for daily life for the
thirteen million people in Metro Manila. It's a grim picture.
Residents using boats on what used to be roads.
Speaker 2: Schools, closing businesses, shutting down infrastructure, constantly water logged. Their
lives are functionally defined by the water level. It's not
an emergency, it's just the baseline reality, and.
Speaker 1: The twenty fifty projection is a true humanitarian nightmare. The
models project that parts of Metro Manila will face permanent
inundation during high tides.
Speaker 2: Permanent, not just flooded, but permanently underwater during high tides.
These areas will no longer be functional neighborhoods.
Speaker 3: They'll be tidal flats.
Speaker 1: Which raises a huge logistics question. If millions of residents
are displaced, where do you move them in an already
densely populated island nation.
Speaker 2: That is the crucial question, and the answer is rarely
clean or orderly. This same dynamic applies just as intensely,
maybe more so, to Lagos Nigeria.
Speaker 1: What are the fastest growing megacities in the world. Lagos
is the ultimate collision point of rapid, unmanaged population growth
and extreme environmental vulnerability.
Speaker 2: Millions of people in Lagos live in extremely vulnerable, low
lying coastal areas, massive and formal settlements.
Speaker 1: And what's crucial here is the interaction between that development
and the environmental degradation.
Speaker 2: We have to look at the unintended consequences. Land reclamation
projects intended to create new, modern, safe areas for business,
like the Eco Atlantic project, they've actually increased the city's
risk by altering natural waterflow. When you fill in wetlands
to build up, you disrupt the natural drainage and storm
buffer systems for the adjacent areas.
Speaker 1: So you solve one problem, but you create a new
and profound one for the older existing.
Speaker 2: Settlements, precisely a self inflicted risk multiplier, and the most
vulnerable are those informal settlements built without protection or drainage.
By twenty fifty, scientists project widespread coastal flooding that will
displace millions. Lagos is growing at an incredible rate directly
into the rising water.
Speaker 1: We've painted a really sobering picture here sinking land, porous rock,
geopolitical surrender, massive population threats we have. So now let's
turn to the city that has fought this battle the
longest and the hardest, the one that provides a benchmark
for what's possible and crucially, what his limits are. We
had to discuss Rotterdam.
Speaker 2: Rotterdam is the ultimate technological fortress. The Netherlands very existence
is a millennia long fight against the sea. They have
the most advanced flood defense system in the world, the Delta.
Speaker 1: Works, including the massive Maizelant Barrier, this huge gait that
protects Rotterdam by swinging shut across the waterway.
Speaker 2: This is a city sitting largely below sea level, protected
by this colossal, multi layered system of barriers, dikes and
immense pumping stations. Netherlands invests billions every single year just
to maintain it.
Speaker 1: They're defining what the peak of human intervention looks like.
Speaker 2: And yet even here in the best defended place on Earth,
the engineers themselves acknowledge there are limits. The sources show
that as sea level rise projections get worse, the pressure
on these defenses increases.
Speaker 1: So systems like the Maslond Barrier, which were designed for
occasional use during a severe storm, may need to operate constantly.
Speaker 2: By mid century, that shift from occasional defense to constant
life support just fundamentally changes the sustainability equation.
Speaker 1: It becomes chronic maintenance, not preventative.
Speaker 2: Think about the logistical and financial strain running billion dollar
machinery non stop, plus closing a barrier constantly disrupts shipping,
and Rotterdam is one of the busiest ports in Europe.
The defense mechanisms start to undermine the very economy they
were built to protect.
Speaker 1: That's the paradox of Rotterdam. By twenty fifty, the city
is expected to remain standing, but only through extreme, ongoing intervention.
It shows what's physically possible when a wealthy commits vast
resources to the problem.
Speaker 2: But it also shows how fragile even the best defenses
can be and at what cost. It gives us a
price tag, a benchmark for what it takes to defeat
this dual calamity.
Speaker 1: And we have to apply that benchmark to the rest
of the world.
Speaker 2: So if we synthesize everything we've looked at, from Jakarta's
drained aquifers to Miami's porous Rock to Venice's sinking foundations.
Speaker 3: The central theme is clear.
Speaker 1: The threat isn't uniform.
Speaker 2: No, it is defined by a local factor, whether that's
subsidence or geology that dramatically amplifies the global factor of
sea level rise. We have to see twenty fifty not
as a distant projection, but as a hard operational deadline
for adaptation or relocation.
Speaker 1: The timelines are collapsing. We've seen cities where land subsadan's
forced the government to literally move its capital. We've seen
others where survival requires billions in annual investment just to
stay dry. The sheer scale of these interventions is what
must stick with us. The cost is staggering.
Speaker 2: And the Rotterdam case provides the ultimate be benchmark for
survival extreme ongoing intervention. It shows what's possible, but with
an astonishing.
Speaker 1: Resource cost, which brings us to a really provocative thought.
We've seen cities sinking under their own weight, others being
eroded back into the sea. The question is last about
if we can save every threat in city, and more
about who gets that extreme ongoing intervention right.
Speaker 2: Not every nation has the engineering budget of the Netherlands.
Speaker 1: So if you had to globally allocate the billions required
for these constant battles for survival. What measure do you
think should be the deciding factor?
Speaker 2: And that's the difficult choice facing policymakers. Do you prioritize
cities based on the raw speed of the threat, the
subsidence rate.
Speaker 1: Or do you prioritize them based on the scale of
the human impact, the population density, the number of people
who will be displaced?
Speaker 2: Or is it the historical or economic significance of the metropolis.
Speaker 1: We've discussed cities where technology saves them and cities where
the government accepted defeat. If you were in charge of
allocating those billions, what measures sidence rate, population density, historical significance,
or something else entirely do you think should be the
deciding factor in which cities fight for survival by twenty.
Speaker 2: Fifty A difficult question to ponder. Thank you for joining
us on this vital and urgent exploration.
Speaker 1: We'll catch you next time on thrilling Threads.