Anthony Doesburg: Where rising tides are more than a future threat

As attendees pack their bags and head for home after the Copenhagen climate-change conference, a country just to the southwest of Denmark has more riding on the outcome than most.

Not for nothing is it called the Netherlands, or the "low countries" - about a quarter of its land and 60 per cent of its population are below sea level. The threat of rising tides is therefore the biggest worry the Dutch face from climate change.

It is not surprising, then, that climate change was a topic Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and United States President Barack Obama discussed when they met for the first time in April.

Balkenende reportedly reminded Obama that the US had not got around to signing the Kyoto protocol, and urged him not to be so neglectful of any agreement that came out of Copenhagen.

It might sound presumptuous for a small European nation to be lecturing the US on the need to take climate change seriously. But the reality is, with water constantly lapping at their feet, the Dutch have been giving the problem more thought than most.

They are far from alone in being vulnerable to rising sea levels - our Pacific neighbours such as Tuvalu and Vanuatu, and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, are nervously watching the water rise. Not to mention the millions of Bangladeshis in the Bay of Bengal who have only a small buffer between dry and wet.

What the Dutch and Bangladeshis have in common is enormous river deltas - in Bangladesh the Ganges and in the Netherlands the Rhine and Meuse. After floods in the Netherlands in 1953 killed about 1900 people, a huge engineering project, the Delta Plan, was undertaken to build barriers against storm surges from the North Sea.

The Delta works, which were only completed about a decade ago, have done their job. But circumstances have changed during the course of the project. For a start, an audit of the country's flood defences in 2006 found numerous weak spots.

"Weak," says journalist Michael Perrson, who covers climate-change issues for Amsterdam's Volkskrant newspaper, means a one-in-2000-years' chance of flooding instead of one in 10,000, as Dutch law requires.

The other change of the past 50 years is the acceptance - by officials, at least - that global warming is causing sea levels to rise.

Time, then, for Dutch planners to sit down again, leading to the formation of a new Delta Committee, which last year came up with a plan to make the Netherlands "climate-proof" for the next century.

The committee worked on the assumption of the tide rising by up to 1.3m by 2100, a figure Perrson says many Dutch thought too pessimistic, but which is in line with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest thinking.

While there is wide public support for measures to keep the country dry, Perrson reckons that is more on historical grounds than a popular belief that global warming is a real threat.

"People don't link the danger to climate change, they link it to the sea and flooding generally."

The committee's plan for this century would see spending of about 1.5 billion ($3 billion) a year on new flood defences. But there has been a shift in thinking.

The plan remains to protect the coast through "beach nourishment" - by pumping sand off the sea floor onto dunes - while inland, where rivers are the threat, the idea is to make room for floodwaters.

New canals are being dug to take overflow from the rivers and development near rivers restricted. But in a country not much bigger than Southland, with a population of 16.5 million, there is pressure to build on all available land.

That is leading to innovative approaches to housing, Perrson says, although they are not necessarily high-tech.

"The most high-tech is to build floating houses in areas close to rivers that rise and fall with water levels."

A low-tech - but pragmatic - idea is the house that does not mind getting wet. When a 10-year flood sweeps through, the occupants move up a level from the ground floor, which is built from materials that can cope with an occasional dousing.

The "circus" of companies cashing in on climate change was going to be Perrson's focus as he attended the second week of the Copenhagen conference, ending today.

While the Volkskrant joined more than 50 other papers around the world and published an editorial a fortnight ago urging politicians to make the most of the conference, Perrson does not think the Dutch are very green. "I don't think you could say the man on the street is really worried or thinking about climate change."

That could take another flood - which officials would like to avoid.

Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist