| OK, so what I'd like you to do now is to talk to your partner about your presentations on urban planning. |
| You should have done most of the reading now, so I'd like you to share your ideas, |
| and talk about the structure of your presentation and what you need to do next. |
| OK Rob. |
| I'm glad we chose quite a specific topic - cities built next to the sea. |
| It made it much easier to find relevant information. |
| Yeah. And cities are growing so quickly - |
| I mean, we know that more than half the world's population lives in cities now. |
| Yeah, though that's all cities, not just ones on the coast. |
| But most of the biggest cities are actually built by the sea. |
| I'd not realised that before. |
| Nor me. |
| And what's more, a lot of them are built at places where rivers come out into the sea. |
| But apparently this can be a problem. |
| Why? |
| Well, as the city expands, |
| agriculture and industry tend to spread further inland along the rivers, |
| and so agriculture moves even further inland up the river. |
| That's not necessarily a problem, |
| except it means more and more pollutants are discharged into the rivers. |
| So these are brought downstream to the cities? |
| Right. |
| Did you read that article about Miami, on the east coast of the USA? |
| No. |
| Well, apparently back in the 1950s, |
| they built channels to drain away the water in case of flooding. |
| Sounds sensible. |
| Yeah, they spent quite a lot of money on them. |
| But what they didn't take into account was global warming. |
| So they built the drainage channels too close to sea level, |
| and now sea levels are rising, they're more or less useless. |
| If there's a lot of rain, the water can't run away, there's nowhere for it to go. |
| The whole design was faulty. |
| So what are the authorities doing about it now? |
| I don't know. |
| I did read that they're aiming to stop disposing of waste water into the ocean over the next ten years. |
| But that won't help with flood prevention now, will it? |
| No. Really they just need to find the money for something to replace the drainage channels, |
| in order to protect against flooding now. |
| But in the long term they need to consider the whole ecosystem. |
| Right. |
| Really, though, coastal cities can't deal with their problems on their own, can they? |
| I mean, they've got to start acting together at an international level instead of just doing their own thing. |
| Absolutely. |
| The thing is, everyone knows what the problems are |
| and environmentalists have a pretty good idea of what we should be doing about them, |
| so they should be able to work together to some extent. |
| But it's going to be a long time before countries come to a decision on what principles they're prepared to abide by. |
| Yeah, if they ever do. |
| So I think we've probably got enough for our presentation. |
| It's only fifteen minutes. |
| OK. |
| So I suppose we'll begin with some general historical background |
| about why coastal cities were established. |
| But we don't want to spend too long on that, |
| the other students will already know a bit about it. |
| It's all to do with communications and so on. |
| Yes. |
| We should mention some geographical factors, |
| things like wetlands and river estuaries and coastal erosion and so on. |
| We could have some maps of different cities with these features marked. |
| On a handout you mean? |
| Or some slides everyone can see? |
| Yeah, that'd be better. |
| It'd be good to go into past mistakes in a bit more detail. |
| Did you read that case study of the problems there were in New Orleans with flooding a few years ago? |
| Yes, We could use that as the basis for that part of the talk. |
| I don't think the other students will have read it, |
| but they'll remember hearing about the flooding at the time. |
| OK. |
| So that's probably enough background. |
| So then we'll go on to talk about what action's being taken to deal with the problems of coastal cities. |
| OK. |
| What else do we need to talk about? |
| Maybe something on future risks, looking more at the long term, if populations continue to grow. |
| Yeah. |
| We'll need to do a bit of work there, |
| I haven't got much information, have you? |
| No. We'll need to look at some websites. |
| Shouldn't take too long. |
| OK. |
| And I think we should end by talking about international implications. |
| Maybe we could ask people in the audience. |
| We've got people from quite a lot of different places. |
| That'd be interesting, if we have time, yes. |
| So now... |