The northern european enclosure dam for if climate change mitigation fails

Abstract

It might be impossible to truly fathom the magnitude of the threat that global-mean sea level rise poses. However, conceptualizing the scale of the solutions required to protect ourselves against global-mean sea level rise aids in our ability to acknowledge and understand that threat. On these grounds, we here discuss a means to protect over 25 million people and important economical regions in northern Europe against sea level rise. We propose the construction of a Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED) that stretches between France, the United Kingdom, and Norway. NEED may seem an overwhelming and unrealistic solution at first. However, our preliminary study suggests that NEED is potentially favorable financially, but also in scale, impacts, and challenges compared to that of alternative solutions, such as (managed) migrations and that of country-by-country protection efforts. The mere realization that a solution as considerable as NEED might be a viable and cost-effective protection measure is illustrative of the extraordinary global threat of global-mean sea level rise that we are facing. As such, the concept of constructing NEED showcases the extent of protection efforts that are required if mitigation efforts fail to limit sea level rise.