Northern European Enclosure Dam

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly clear that the current climate policy is not beneficial to our planet. Climate change is having several negative effects on the planetary environment and its health (Rig- not et al., 2011). Among these negative effects is the rise of the seawater level (Jevrejeva et al., 2014). Efforts are being made to counter this with various actions, such as the Paris agreement (Levine & Steele, 2021). However, there is a chance that the agreement will turn out differently than planned (Meinshausen, 2016). It is therefore important, and socially most-relevant, to think about what to do if this happens. This means that alternatives are being looked into and examined. A drastic alternative is the Northern European Enclosure Dam (NEED). NEED is a dam that consists of two parts to protect Northern Europe against the rising of the sea level. The idea for this radical innovation, to create a dam consisting of two parts, comes from oceanographer Sjoerd Groeskamp and engineer Joakim Kjellsson and came to life in 2019. The first part is the southern part which runs from France to England, with a length of 161 kilometers. The second part is the northern part which runs from Scotland to Norway, with a length of 476 kilometers (Groeskamp & Kjellsson, 2020)