The billion-dollar floodgates being installed in Venice might not save the city. These mobile floodgates are being constructed with the aim of safeguarding the 1,300-year-old island city of Venice. The ambitious and costly engineering feat may not be enough to protect the city from rising sea levels due to climate change.

Having risen from mudflats in the middle of a lagoon which forms the largest wetland in the Mediterranean, Venice is one of the world’s most endangered cities as its sinking land and the rising sea levels have been causing increasing flooding. On December 1, 2008, Venice experienced its worst flooding in the last 22 years.

Project MOSE (also the Italian word for Moses of the biblical parting of the sea) will be completed in 2014. By then, ‘there will be 78 large, mobile flood gates at the three inlets. When not in use, they will sit on the lagoon bed. When a high tide is forecast, the gates will rise and shut off the sea from the lagoon.’

While the project is now 54 percent completed, experts opine that it may already be outdated. ‘The IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — has forecast a sea level rise by the end of this century of between 18 and 59 centimeters. But scientists caution it could be even higher.’

Another radical solution is being conceptualized to complement the Moses solution: uplifting the entire city. This is literally raising Venice. Marine scientist Laura Carbognin says, “Based on hydrological and geochemical data, the preliminary simulation shows that fluid injection into deep formation can uniformly raise Venice up to 30 centimeters over 10 years.”

Via npr