Apuestas con super-tifones en el futuro de Macao

The Ecotopia 2121 Project details the futures of 100 cities across the globe as though they've somehow overcome all the grave environmental challenges our age and grown to become super-Green and super-ecofriendly. This month, we highlight the future of Macau.

Macao tuvo que cerrar sus casinos por primera vez en la historia para lidiar con el súper tifón Mangkhut. Así es como Macao puede prepararse para el futuro contra las tormentas oceánicas más fuertes del mañana que cambiaron el clima.

Macau’s location on the Pearl River estuary makes it vulnerable to typhoon storm surges and climate-change induced rises in sea level. Over the course of three centuries, the city has sought to reclaim land from the sea to allow for urban growth. Yet, if the sea level rises by just a few meters, as is currently predicted, these reclaimed zones are likely to be submerged again or eroded during high-tides and increasingly wild typhoon surges.

The land upon which the city sits is also increasingly vulnerable to land subsidence because of increased groundwater extraction. Macau is sinking. The seas are rising.

How is Macau to deal with this situation?

Since Macau is one of the gambling capitals of the world, they should be sensitive to the value of calculating future risks. Sometime in the early 21st Century, these risk-calculators will be bound to advise Macau’s administrators and business leaders that drastic adaptive measures will need to be implemented to preserve the profitability of the gambling and tourist sectors. Risk assessors in the insurance industry are also likely to have an impact since their risk advice about future potential environmental change will suggest that the casinos, the hoteliers, the tourist agencies, and the airlines will have to pay more and more each year for insurance.

To deal with such profit-eroding environmental change, this scenario of 2121 depicts the casinos of Macau to be condensed and contained with one circular gambling zone and then surrounded by a huge walled-barrier to protect it from sea-level innundations and storm-surges. The rest of the city then has to be rebuilt on the nearby hills of Macau.

Si el clima continúa calentándose en este siglo, para 2121, los mosquitos infectados con malaria del sudeste asiático habrán expandido su área de distribución hacia el norte, hasta Macao. Por lo tanto, la barrera se electrifica en un intento de mantener a los jugadores libres de mosquitos. Realmente, la barrera no hace nada para detener la causa raíz del cambio climático global, pero permitirá a los casinos sobrevivir el tiempo suficiente para adoptar medidas de mitigación ecológicas, como cambiar a nuevas máquinas de juego de baja potencia y donar todas sus ganancias a proyectos de restauración ecológica en Macao..