For centuries, the Dutch have been extending their land area, by reclaiming land from the sea. The process was; build a seawall (dike) that enclosed an area of sea bottom, then pump out the seawater, dig trenches and canals, and drain the salt out of the soil. In a few years, the polderland can be used to grow crops. In this way, formerly flooded areas can be made into productive farmland. My question is: back in the 1960’s, there was a plan to connect the East Frisian Islands (in the North Sea), with dikes, and turn the enclosed land into dry farmland. Was this given up as too expensive? How much does reclaimed land cost-is it even worth it?
And, if global warming is taking place, sea levels will rise-which will make a lot of this reclaimed land dangerous to inhabit.
Is reclaiming land over (for now) in the Netherlands? Are the environmental costs too high?
The Netherlands are a very densely populated country. According to Wiki, the population density is 395 people per square kilometer, or 1023 per square mile (in the U.S., it’s 31/sq km or 80/sq mile). Reclamation is practically the only way for such a country to increase inhabitable area to accomodate population growth; there’s no alternative.
Actually, I don’t think the process is that expensive. The most expensive part of it is filling up the dam, and the most important cost factor in this is labor. In previous centuries, manual labor was darn cheap, and in many cases you didn’t even have to pay for it at all - many coastal communities of the past made participation in dike works mandatory for inhabitants. Nowadays, this is not the case, but modern excavators can handle large amounts of dirt at little cost. In many cases, you also get additional benefits - similarly to the Hoover Dam and like projects in the U.S., dike building in Holland was part of a public program to stimulate industrial activity during the Great Depression, so the money would have been spent anyway.
The Wikipedia page on the Zuidersee Works of the 1920s and 30s, which drained the land on which the tenth province, Flevoland, lies, mentions that the main dam cost the equivalent of 700 million euros. Other dams had to be built to finish the project, but even taking this into account, I wouldn’t regard these costs as excessive, considering that the project increased the land area of the country by several per cent. The Delta Project, which was aimed not at reclaiming land but at protecting the coast against floods, was much more expensive.
There are other examples of communities rich in money but poor in land which try to solve their problems by reclamation. Similar projects, though on a smaller scale, are almost constantly under progress in Monaco and the Chinese self-administrating regions of Macao and Hong Kong.
This newspaper article might be of interest.
Relevant quote from the article:
“Atsma says high land prices threaten the country’s position as one of the world’s exporter of agricultural products, and make a 100,000 hectare, or 247,000 acre, island potentially worth €10 billion, or $14.69 billion - enough of a return to fund the project.”