Urban planners hoping to mitigate floods by specifically designing municipalities to soak up water

“After massive flooding in 2011 caused $1.8 billion in damage, Copenhagen began refashioning its infrastructure: It built wetlands and parks, plus underground pipes and basins, to gather and redirect the rainwater. The project is ongoing, but it is already helping the Danish capital withstand torrential rains, and the “sponge city” model is being copied by “cities as disparate as Auckland, Nairobi, Singapore, New York, Rotterdam, and Berlin,” Yale Environment 360 reported. Using nature-based features, like gardens and trees, is key, as while rainwater gathers on top of concrete, it filters down into soil, and is sucked up by plants…

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that urban centers in high latitudes will experience both heavier and more frequent rain events in future decades, with 100-year flood events at least doubling in frequency across 40 percent of the globe by 2050, according to a 2024 paper published in Nature. Moreover, the melting of polar ice sheets will cause sea levels to rise — an obvious threat to low-lying, sea-bound Denmark. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts as much as 55 percent more precipitation in the winter months by 2100, with downpours ever more intense, should global temperatures rise by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. Denmark’s adjacent seas — the North and the Baltic — could rise by up to 4 feet.