not just in cities and towns …..
/model of the new Wadden Sea interpretation by Dorte Mandrup
This blog is about Danish architecture - about buildings and the built environment - and about design and making or design and manufacturing so, in the recent posts about climate-change mitigation, the schemes discussed have been about dealing with flooding from rain storms in the city.
Work to mitigate the consequences of climate change is crucial because it has been predicted that, with global warming, annual rain fall in Denmark could increase by as much as 30%. This will not be spread evenly through the year but there will be sudden and dramatic storms with torrential rain falling over a relatively sort period of thirty minutes or an hour.
I was not in the city for the devastating storm of 2011 so I did not see first-hand the damage done then as drains were overwhelmed and - as streets flooded - buildings were inundated but I had seen some of the videos that people took showing the intensity of the rain.
Then, about a month after I moved to Copenhagen, there was a sudden storm that flooded local streets. Where I was living, each apartment had storage space in the basement and I lost packing boxes, tools in plastic boxes later rusted and books that had been left down there were ruined. For nearby businesses, damage took months and in some cases years to sort out where floors lifted and electric systems were damaged beyond simple repair. In that storm, the water was about 30 cm deep across the basement with water running down from the street and pumps had to be brought in but in 2011, I was told, water had come up to the level of the basement ceiling so I can see why city politicians have spent so much money and time and effort on trying to make Copenhagen more resilient. Some 300 schemes have been completed or are, to use a bad pun, in the pipe line.
Denmark is renowned for its modern architecture and for furniture design but the country also has a strong and world-wide reputation for its engineering and this is crucial for the successful completion of appropriate mitigation projects.
But this is not to suggest that all the problems and all the major protection plans are urban.
Denmark is a relative small country but it is a country made up of islands - there are some 443 named islands - and it has a disproportionately long coast line of around 8,750 kilometres. To put this in perspective, there is one land border - the border with Germany - and that is just 68 kilometres across.
And the country is low - not as low as parts of the Netherlands of course - but the highest point is just 171 metres above sea level. It is also something of a moving problem as the sea takes away and then redistributes sediment and builds up new land elsewhere and to such an extent that the calculated area of the country is changing regularly.
It has been calculated that 17% so nearly a sixth of Danish homes are vulnerable to flooding with 10,644 along streams, 393,574 in hollows liable to flood and 64,000 homes along the coast.
I now live on Nyhavn in Copenhagen where the quay is just 15 metres wide and the level of the water is less than 2 metres below the edge of the wharf. There is hardly anywhere better to live but, to put climate change in some sort of perspective, current predictions suggest that if global warming continues and glaciers and the Greenland ice mass melt then sea levels could rise by 1.5 metres …. and right now, right here, the front door of the building where I live is 20 steps and 1.8 metres above the Baltic.
So, extensive engineering schemes are needed to protect coast lines around the country and there has to be ongoing discussion about the other policies needed to protect some areas. Particularly important, rare or unique natural landscapes habitats like the Wadden Sea area on the west coast of Denmark are being protected and last week there was a debate in the newspaper about the possibility returning areas of peat bog at Vejen Mose in Jutland to their original state because draining the land for agricultural use has released carbon deposited there …. as much as 1.4 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year.
These decisions are not easy and not cheap but are now urgent and, as with all policies about climate change and sustainability, complicated and difficult compromises will have to be made.
