Reclaimed_land

Land reclamation

Land reclamation

Creating new land from oceans, seas, riverbeds or lakes


Land reclamation, usually known as reclamation, and also known as land fill (not to be confused with a waste landfill), is the process of creating new land from oceans, seas, riverbeds or lake beds. The land reclaimed is known as reclamation ground, reclaimed land, or land fill.

Reclaiming in Mounts Bay, Perth, Australia 1964
The former airport of Hong Kong (pictured) and the current airport of Hong Kong were built on reclaimed land.
The largest city square in the world, the Xinghai Square of Dalian, China, was created entirely through land reclamation.

In some jurisdictions, including parts of the United States,[1] the term "reclamation" can refer to returning disturbed lands to an improved state. In Alberta, Canada, for example, reclamation is defined by the provincial government as "The process of reconverting disturbed land to its former or other productive uses."[2] In Oceania, it is frequently referred to as land rehabilitation.

History

One of the earliest large-scale projects was the Beemster Polder in the Netherlands, realized in 1612 adding 70 square kilometres (27 sq mi) of land. In Hong Kong the Praya Reclamation Scheme added 20 to 24 hectares (50 to 60 acres) of land in 1890 during the second phase of construction. It was one of the most ambitious projects ever taken during the Colonial Hong Kong era.[3] Some 20% of land in the Tokyo Bay area has been reclaimed,[4] most notably Odaiba artificial island. Le Portier, Monaco and Gibraltar are also expanding due to land reclamation. The city of Rio de Janeiro was largely built on reclaimed land, as was Wellington, New Zealand..

Methods

Land reclamation can be achieved by a number of different methods. The simplest method involves filling the area with large amounts of heavy rock and/or cement, then filling with clay and dirt until the desired height is reached. The process is called "infilling"[5] and the material used to fill the space is generally called "infill".[6][7] Draining of submerged wetlands is often used to reclaim land for agricultural use. Deep cement mixing is used typically in situations in which the material displaced by either dredging or draining may be contaminated and hence needs to be contained. Land dredging is also another method of land reclamation. It is the removal of sediments and debris from the bottom of a body of water. It is commonly used for maintaining reclaimed land masses as sedimentation, a natural process, fills channels and harbors.[8]

Notable instances

East Coast Park in Singapore was built on reclaimed land with a human-made beach.
The Flevopolder in the Netherlands, reclaimed from the IJsselmeer, is the largest reclaimed artificial island in the world.
Land Reclamation in the Beirut Central District
The whole district of Fontvieille, Monaco was reclaimed from the sea

Africa

 Morocco

 Nigeria

 South Africa

 Tanzania

Asia

 Bahrain

 China

 India

 Indonesia

 Japan

 Lebanon

 Maldives

 Malaysia

  • Forest City, an integrated residential and tourism district in Johor, Malaysia, was controversial due to its reclamation of wetlands of international importance under the Ramsar Convention in a designated Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) Rank 1 area.

 Pakistan

 Philippines

 Qatar

 Singapore

  • The city-state of Singapore, where land is in short supply, is also famous for its efforts on land reclamation.[13]
  • The size of Singapore has increased by 25% from 581.5 square kilometres in 1960 to 725.7 in 2019. This is part of the nation's plans to create more homes and common spaces in the land scarce city-state. Upcoming projects, such as the Long Island project, involving the reclamation of three tracts of land (expected to span around 800 ha), which is set at a higher level to protect against rising sea levels. It will also enclose a body of water, acting as a reservoir, strengthening the nation's water resilience. Detailed technical studies are currently underway lasting 5 years. This project would take a few decades to plan and implement[14][15]

 South Korea

 Sri Lanka

 United Arab Emirates

Europe

 Belarus

  • The southwestern residential area in Brest.

 Belgium

 Denmark

 Finland

  • Helsinki (of which the major part of the city center is built on reclaimed land).

 France

 Greece

 Ireland

 Italy

 Monaco

 Netherlands

 Norway

  • Parts of Bryggen, Bergen including the Dreggekaien cruise terminal and other ship services.

 Russia

 Spain

 Turkey

 United Kingdom

 Ukraine

  • Majority of left-bank and some right-bank residential areas of Kyiv were built on a reclaimed fens and floodplains of the Dnieper river.

North America

 Bahamas

 Bermuda

  • Much of Bermuda's St David's Island are reclaimed; the island, the site of Bermuda's international airport, was formerly several smaller islands.

 Canada

 Mexico

 United States

Oceania

 Australia

 Fiji

  • My Suva park, a recreation park for the Greater Suva area.

 New Zealand

  • Considerable areas of Dunedin, New Zealand, including the "Southern Endowment", stretching from the central city to the southeastern suburbs along the shore of Otago Harbour.
  • Prior to the Napier earthquake of 1931, significant reclamation of the then-lagoon was undertaken in areas of Napier South and Ahuriri. There were also minor reclamation works undertaken after 1931 on the new low-lying lands brought up by the earthquake.
  • Areas around Wellington and Auckland's harbours have also been reclaimed.

South America

 Argentina

 Brazil

 Chile

 Colombia

 Panama

 Uruguay

  • Parts of Montevideo, Rambla Sur and several projects still going on in Montevideo's Bay.

 Venezuela

Agriculture

Land reclamation in progress in Bingzhou (丙州) Peninsula (formerly, island) of the Dongzui Bay (东咀港). Tong'an District, Xiamen, China

Agriculture was a driver of land reclamation before industrialisation.[27] In South China, farmers reclaimed paddy fields by enclosing an area with a stone wall on the sea shore near a river mouth or river delta. The species of rice that are grown on these grounds are more salt tolerant. Another use of such enclosed land is the creation of fish ponds. It is commonly seen on the Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong. These reclaimed areas also attract species of migrating birds.

A related practice is the draining of swampy or seasonally submerged wetlands to convert them to farmland. While this does not create new land exactly, it allows commercially productive use of land that would otherwise be restricted to wildlife habitat. It is also an important method of mosquito control.

Even in the post-industrial age, there have been land reclamation projects intended for increasing available agricultural land. For example, the village of Ogata in Akita, Japan, was established on land reclaimed from Lake Hachirōgata (Japan's second largest lake at the time) starting in 1957. By 1977, the amount of land reclaimed totalled 172.03 square kilometres (66.42 sq mi).[28]

Artificial islands

Artificial islands are an example of land reclamation. Creating an artificial island is an expensive and risky undertaking. It is often considered in places with high population density and a scarcity of flat land. Kansai International Airport (in Osaka) and Hong Kong International Airport are examples where this process was deemed necessary. The Palm Islands, The World and hotel Burj al-Arab off Dubai in the United Arab Emirates are other examples of artificial islands (although there is yet no real "scarcity of land" in Dubai), as well as the Flevopolder in the Netherlands which is the largest artificial island in the world.

Beach restoration

Beach rebuilding is the process of repairing beaches using materials such as sand or mud from inland. This can be used to build up beaches suffering from beach starvation or erosion from longshore drift. It stops the movement of the original beach material through longshore drift and retains a natural look to the beach. Although it is not a long-lasting solution, it is cheap compared to other types of coastal defences. An example of this is the city of Mumbai.[11]

Landfill

As human overcrowding of developed areas intensified during the 20th century, it has become important to develop land re-use strategies for completed landfills. Some of the most common usages are for parks, golf courses and other sports fields. Increasingly, however, office buildings and industrial uses are made on a completed landfill. In these latter uses, methane capture is customarily carried out to minimize explosive hazard within the building.

An example of a Class A office building constructed over a landfill is the Dakin Building at Sierra Point, Brisbane, California. The underlying fill was deposited from 1965 to 1985, mostly consisting of construction debris from San Francisco and some municipal wastes. Aerial photographs prior to 1965 show this area to be tidelands of the San Francisco Bay. A clay cap was constructed over the debris prior to building approval.[29]

A notable example is Sydney Olympic Park, the primary venue for the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, which was built atop an industrial wasteland that included landfills.

Another strategy for landfill is the incineration of landfill trash at high temperature via the plasma-arc gasification process, which is currently used at two facilities in Japan, and will be used at a planned facility in St. Lucie County, Florida.[30]

Environmental impact

Parts (highlighted in brown) of the San Francisco Bay were reclaimed from wetlands for urban use.

Draining wetlands for ploughing, for example, is a form of habitat destruction. In some parts of the world, new reclamation projects are restricted or no longer allowed, due to environmental protection laws. Reclamation projects have strong negative impacts on coastal populations, although some species can take advantage of the newly created area.[31] A 2022 global analysis estimated that 39% of losses (approximately 5,300 km2 or 2,000 sq mi) and 14% of gains (approximately 1,300 km2 or 500 sq mi) of tidal wetlands (mangroves, tidal flats, and tidal marshes) between 1999-2019 were due to direct human activities, including conversion to aquaculture, agriculture, plantations, coastal developments and other physical structures.[32]

Environmental legislation

A map of reclaimed land (grey area) in Hong Kong. Many of the urban areas of Hong Kong are on reclaimed land.

The State of California created a state commission, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, in 1965 to protect San Francisco Bay and regulate development near its shores. The commission was created in response to growing concern over the shrinking size of the bay.

Hong Kong legislators passed the Protection of the Harbour Ordinance, proposed by the Society for Protection of the Harbour, in 1997 in an effort to safeguard the increasingly threatened Victoria Harbour against encroaching land development.[33] Several large reclamation schemes at Green Island, West Kowloon, and Kowloon Bay were subsequently shelved, and others reduced in size.

Dangers

Reclaimed land is highly susceptible to soil liquefaction during earthquakes,[34] which can amplify the amount of damage that occurs to buildings and infrastructure. Subsidence is another issue, both from soil compaction on filled land, and also when wetlands are enclosed by levees and drained to create Polders. Drained marshes will eventually sink below the surrounding water level, increasing the danger from flooding.

Land amounts added

Asia

More information Country or territory, Notes ...

Europe

More information Country, Notes ...

Other countries

More information Country, Notes ...

List of reclaimed land by country and territory

See also


Notes

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  2. Powter, Chris (2002). Glossary of Reclamation and Remediation Terms used in Alberta (PDF). Government of Alberta. ISBN 0-7785-2156-7. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-04-09. Retrieved 2012-04-01.
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  5. Lambi, Cornelius Mbifung (2001). Environmental issues: problems and prospects. Bamenda, Cameroon: Unique Printers. p. 152. ISBN 978-9956-11-005-6.
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  9. Murray N. J., Clemens R. S., Phinn S. R., Possingham H. P. & Fuller R. A. (2014) Tracking the rapid loss of tidal wetlands in the Yellow Sea. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12, 267–72 doi:10.1890/130260
  10. Brian Lander. State Management of River Dikes in Early China: New Sources on the Environmental History of the Central Yangzi Region . T'oung Pao 100.4-5 (2014): 325–362; Mira Mihelich, “Polders and Politics of Land Reclamation in Southeast China during the Northern Sung” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell Univ., 1979); Peter Perdue, Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan 1500–1850 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1987); Mei Li 梅莉, Zhang Guoxiong 張國雄, and Yan Changgui 晏昌貴, Lianghu pingyuan kaifa tanyuan 兩湖平原開發探源 (Nanchang: Jiangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995); Shiba Yoshinobu, “Environment versus Water Control: The Case of the Southern Hangzhou Bay Area from the Mid-Tang Through the Qing,” in Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, ed. Mark Elvin and Ts'ui-jung Liu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 135–64
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  14. The references are given in the article on the topic.
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References


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