As some of you know, I live in the Netherlands, quite close to the Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier (or "Oosterscheldekering" in Dutch), one of the seven wonders of the modern world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OosterscheldekeringI remember when it was finished in 1986, I was in elementary school / primary school. One of my classmates' father worked for the project and she gave a presentation about it. My parents took me and my brothers there to take a look at it, those huuuuuge concrete foundation blocks made quite an impression on me. I remember how safe it felt to know that we had finally won the battle against the sea, that we would now be safe from the floodings that had happened throughout history.
The Oosterscheldekering was the closing part of the Delta Works, a huge project to protect our country from the sea. It was designed to be enough for two centuries, but those two centuries are quickly melting away, now that we know that sea level is going to rise. Many dikes have been made higher already in the past several years, but there is a limit to how high we can go; eventually we'd have to pump riverwater over the dikes into the sea, which would be... well... challenging, to say the least.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2019/07/dutch-barricade-against-climate-change/I really hope mankind will understand how serious climate change is. Not specifically for the Dutch. We've been at this for centuries, we'll be alright for a while. But there are other places in the world that aren't so well protected and don't have the means (or the time) to build anything like this.
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