Rising up in a thin line through waters separating provinces of rth Holland and Friesland, 87-year-old Afsluitdijk is one of low-lying Nerlands’ key defenses against its ancient enemy, sea. With climate change bringing more powerful storms and rising sea levels, dike is getting a major makeover. Dutch government has embarked on a future-proofing project to beef up iconic 32-kilometer (20-mile) dam. Work is alrey underway and is expected to continue until 2023.

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Sea-rise a worldwide concern

Just what Afsluitdijk and rest of world’s coastal regions will have to endure in coming deces will be outlined this week in a new United Nations scientific report on impact of climate change on ice and oceans. Dutch, whose low-lying country is crisscrossed by rivers and bordered by sea, have been battling with water for centuries. That challenge will only grow as warmer temperatures cause sea levels to rise. With that in mind, government this year established a “kwledge program on rising sea levels” that aims to feed expertise into country’s ongoing program of building and maintaining its water defenses.

“ Nerlands is currently safest delta in world,” government said, anuncing new program. “We want to keep it that way.” Boris Teunis, an expert on emergency water manment with Dutch water ncy Rijkswaterstaat, said in a recent interview that sea levels have been rising for years “but what we are worrying about is if that is going to accelerate.”

Engineers are strengning Afsluitdijk, including laying thousands of custom-me concrete blocks and raising parts of it. y are also improving highway that runs over narrow strip of man-me land which lies between shallow Wden Sea and Ijsselmeer inland sea and which, despite its name, is technically a dam rar than a dike because it separates water from water.

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design behind dike

cutting edge of design work for strengning is t being done at a beach or estuary, but in a long wave tank kwn as flume in an industrial area of Delft, historic city best kwn for its delicate blue and white china and painter Johannes Vermeer. Engineers built a scale model of a cross-section of Afsluitdijk in tank and are pounding it with waves that y say should occur only once every 10,000 years. goal is to make sure new design can survive destructive power of such a storm. Mark Klein Breteler, a dike expert and project manr at Deltares, water research center that built and uses flume, said new design of Afsluitdijk needs to handle everything that climate change throws at it. “We kw about sea-level rise but also storminess of this area is increasing, so wind speeds are higher and we get larger waves,” he said.

This kind of invation and constant care needed to maintain Nerland’s thousands of miles of dikes and levees does t come cheap. government has earmarked nearly 18 billion euros ($20 billion) to fund such projects for period from 2020-2033. But return on that investment is more than just dry feet for 17 million people who live in Nerlands. An industry group estimated that country’s water sector exports were worth 7.6 billion euros ($8.3 billion) in 2018, as Dutch sell ir expertise to or low-lying countries and cities around world. “ major challenge is to take water and changing climate into account in all spatial planning” in Nerlands, Delta Commissioner Peter Glas wrote in a report this month.

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