'You can’t just keep building sea walls': Dutch solution urged to counter Christchurch flooding risk

By Chris Barclay

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Storey’s study for the Deep South National Science Challenge predicted Christchurch would have 4850 houses affected by premiums quadrupling after a 13-14cm rise in sea levels.

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“You can’t just keep building (sea) walls, Holland gave that up and they’ve been living with this forever,” he said.

“What they’ve done is retreat from certain areas, create wetlands and build new islands off the coast. They’re habitat islands and what they do is they actually break up waves.

“Clever engineering, building buildings that are movable ... floating houses, all the stuff they do in Holland – that will all be part of dealing with this.

“We will have to reimagine and re-engineer our coastlines.

“Everything is coming to a peak now, and we have to act on things that we’ve known about since the 70s.”

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