How green is the world?

Evaluating Dubai's island-reclamation project.

New artificial islands, known as “The World”, are part of a plan to create hundreds of kilometres of new waterfront for Dubai, attracting visitors and wealthy home-owners from around the (real) world. These 300 islands you can find just off Dubai's coast.


All of the artificial islands are built (by Nakheel) the same way. Masses of sand are gathered from the seafloor of the Arabian Gulf. The sand is then brought to Dubai and sprayed in a giant arc onto the shallow (10.5 meter) seabed off the coast. The sand piles up until it breaks through the surface of the water and forms an island about 4.5m high. Then a massive breakwater is built around the islands to protect them from the stiff local sea currents. It is expensive work: each development typically costs billions of dollars.

But those gigantic works bring some negative effects with them :
The intensive construction of Palm Jumeirah created vast plumes of sediment that turned blue seawater milky and temporarily damaged marine life. It also destroyed turtle nesting sites and the only known coral reef along Dubai’s coast.
However, Nakheel says that, in the end, the balance will be positive. He promisses that the environmental impact will be better than before..
Of course we have to wait and see that first.

The question that most people will have is of course :
"Do artificial structures in the ocean actually promote more life, or do they simply attract it?"
It's difficult to give an answer to that question, because people have a different idea of this situation. What we can say is, that those artificial islands will always be good for one thing but bad for the other...

We can't say that The World and the other islands are a green paradise at this time, and
as our climate continues to change, thanks at least in part to the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, sea levels will probably keep rising, turning low-lying islands into something less than a paradise...

SOURCE