A global network of delta cities and provinces, from Jakarta to San Francisco Bay, will work together to find solutions to common climate challenges under a new organisation launched in Holland yesterday.<\/p>\n
The Delta Alliance aims to boost resilience in the world’s low-lying deltas, which are home to more than half the world’s population and are particularly vulnerable to the effects of sea-level rise, salt-water intrusion and subsidence.<\/p>\n
The body is headquartered in the Netherlands and has three other activity hubs in Indonesia, California and Vietnam, all of which are grappling with climate-related challenges. The land beneath Jakarta, a city of 8.5 million people with 13 rivers running through it, is subsiding at a rate of one to 10 centimetres per year. Flood risk in the Netherlands’ port city of Rotterdam is expected to increase by a factor of 10 by 2050 due to sea-level rise.<\/p>\n
Speaking at the alliance’s official launch at an international adaptation conference in Rotterdam, chairman Kees Slingerland said the organisation would strive to be more than a talking shop.<\/p>\n
He said: “We have to talk, we have to connect, but we have to show that international cooperation is not only talking but bringing realistic programmes.”<\/p>\n
The network’s activities will include joint research and demonstration projects as well as symposiums and workshops.<\/p>\n
Slingerland said that other countries, including China, were already involved in the alliance in addition to the four core partners, and that the network planned to expand soon.<\/p>\n
Speaking in the opening session, Ren Wenwei from WWF China explained the value of the network to China. He said: “The Yangtze Delta, for example, plays a huge role in China’s economic development, but it’s also a very important ecosystem, and sometimes economic development and nature conservation conflict. So we want to learn from other deltas how to manage and learn from different stakeholders.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A global network of delta cities and provinces, from Jakarta to San Francisco Bay, will work together to find solutions to common climate challenges under a new organisation launched in Holland yesterday. The Delta Alliance aims to boost resilience in the world’s low-lying deltas, which are home to more than half the world’s population and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":603,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_has_post_settings":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[761],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"country":[],"class_list":["post-28839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n