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Land Reclamation

News: There have been considerable land reclamation operations globally as a result of the coastal regions’ rising economic significance, particularly in East Asia, the Middle East, and West Africa.

Rising sea levels and storm surges present environmental concerns and potential threats for these projects.

The act of converting existing bodies of water, such as seas, rivers, lakes, or marshes, into new land is known as land reclamation.

It involves converting marshes or other water bodies, and it often happens near coastlines but it can also happen inland.

Coastal areas have traditionally been expanded for industrial and agricultural uses using land reclamation techniques.

Building a series of dikes to contain tidal marshes or shallow offshore waterways, then draining these enclosures to make dry land, was the traditional method of land reclamation.

In certain instances, waterways were changed to carry more silt into these regions, raising the level of the land.

The land might be progressively pushed out into the ocean by excavating it from the mainland and dumping it along the shore or on the coast of existing islands.

Today, large engineering projects include building kilometres of offshore concrete barrier walls that are filled with a significant amount of sand, dirt, clay or rock that is frequently imported from a great distance away.

Hydraulic reclamation is a method of filling the reclamation site with dredged dirt from the nearby seafloor combined with water.

A total of 2,530 square kilometres (more than 900 square miles) of new coastal land have been generated by reclamation operations in 106 towns worldwide, according to a study that looked at satellite images of coastal cities with a population of at least 1 million.

Over the past two decades, East Asia has developed about 90% of the world’s new coastal land, frequently to make room for industry and port infrastructure serving the region’s increasingly globalised economy.

China alone added almost 350 square kilometres between 2000 and 2020, and huge new territories were also created in Singapore and Incheon, South Korea.