Our President, Dr. Stefan Huebner, recently penned a Correspondence for Nature, shedding light on the role of floating homes and structures as essential tools in climate adaptation strategies. 🌊🏠
“Your Comment article on building climate-resilient coastal communities (I. Ajibade & S. H. Shah Nature 632, 733–736; 2024) was welcome, but did not address one of the central problems: the lack of social and political acceptance of living on water in the Western world.
As the article noted, floating, amphibious and stilted homes that are built of wood and bamboo have been used for centuries. In parts of Asia, for example, they have been used to adapt to monsoon and typhoon flooding. But in the twentieth century, architects and politicians began to marginalize these structures in favour of ‘modern’ ones built using materials such as concrete and steel. Together with land reclamation, this encouraged ‘terracentric’ urbanization and industrialization (S. Huebner Mod. Asian Stud. 56, 1053–1082; 2022). In some parts of the West, living on houseboats became associated with a hippie counterculture (K. Kinder The Politics of Urban Waters, Univ. Georgia Press; 2015).
The United Nations, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the governments of the Maldives and Saudi Arabia and the Society of Floating Solutions (Singapore), of which I am president, are among those that have begun to support floating homes and settlements for transformative coastal adaptation. However, a lack of social and political acceptance is apparent. Research on coastal-adaptation strategies would benefit from looking beyond terracentric perspectives.”
Interested in diving deeper into this topic? You can read Dr. Huebner’s Correspondence in Nature here and check out the original commentary he was responding to here.
Let’s keep pushing the conversation forward on coastal adaptation solutions!