Floating cities look less like a pipe dream now

Climate change has prompted tech entrepreneurs to devise innovative solutions

You might call it a Noah’s Ark for an era of melting polar ice sheets. An audacious plan to respond to climate change by building a city of floating islands in the South Pacific is moving forward, with the government of French Polynesia agreeing to consider hosting the islands in a tropical lagoon.

The project is being put forward by a California nonprofit, the Seasteading Institute, which has raised about $2.5 million from more than 1,000 interested donors. Randolph Hencken, the group’s executive director, said work on the project could start in French Polynesia as early as next year, pending the results of some environmental and economic feasibility studies.

“We have a vision that we’re going to create an industry that provides floating islands to people who are threatened by rising sea levels,” Hencken said.

The group’s original founders included Peter Thiel, a billionaire investor and prominent supporter of President Trump, although Thiel is no longer donating to the institute, Hencken said.

Hencken said the project’s pilot islands would cost a total of $10 million to $50 million and house a few dozen people and that the initial residents would most likely be middle-income buyers from the developed world. He added that the institute was seeking to build the islands in what would be a nautical version of a special economic zone and that it would showcase innovations in solar power, sustainable aquaculture and ocean-based wind farms.

The project’s leaders face many hurdles, such as building waste-management systems for the islands and convincing investors to buy property in such an untested environment. Joe Quirk, a spokesman for the Seasteading Institute, said in a 2014 video that the cost of housing on the artificial islands would initially be on par with real estate in London or New York City.

But the project also appears to show how the acceleration of climate change has prompted technology entrepreneurs to devise innovative solutions to climate-related problems like rising sea levels.

“The oceans are the most ignored part of the planet, so I’m excited by the possibilities which will emerge when you get some of Silicon Valley’s more adventurous souls focusing on the sustainable use of our coastal and marine areas,” Lelei LeLaulu, a development entrepreneur from Samoa who specialises in the Pacific Islands and advises the International Finance Corporation on sustainable business, said in an email from French Polynesia.

But the project has critics in French Polynesia and beyond.

Alexandre Le Quéré, a radio host at the station Polynésie 1ère, said this month that the Seasteading Institute’s project reminded him of a plan to build artificial islands off the Indonesian resort island of Bali that has drawn heavy criticism amid concern over its projected environmental effects.

© New York Times News Service