1OK, so what I'd like you to do now is to talk to your partner about your presentations on urban planning.
2You should have done most of the reading now, so I'd like you to share your ideas,
3and talk about the structure of your presentation and what you need to do next.
4OK Rob.
5I'm glad we chose quite a specific topic - cities built next to the sea.
6It made it much easier to find relevant information.
7Yeah. And cities are growing so quickly -
8I mean, we know that more than half the world's population lives in cities now.
9Yeah, though that's all cities, not just ones on the coast.
10But most of the biggest cities are actually built by the sea.
11I'd not realised that before.
12Nor me.
13And what's more, a lot of them are built at places where rivers come out into the sea.
14But apparently this can be a problem.
15Why?
16Well, as the city expands,
17agriculture and industry tend to spread further inland along the rivers,
18and so agriculture moves even further inland up the river.
19That's not necessarily a problem,
20except it means more and more pollutants are discharged into the rivers.
21So these are brought downstream to the cities?
22Right.
23Did you read that article about Miami, on the east coast of the USA?
24No.
25Well, apparently back in the 1950s,
26they built channels to drain away the water in case of flooding.
27Sounds sensible.
28Yeah, they spent quite a lot of money on them.
29But what they didn't take into account was global warming.
30So they built the drainage channels too close to sea level,
31and now sea levels are rising, they're more or less useless.
32If there's a lot of rain, the water can't run away, there's nowhere for it to go.
33The whole design was faulty.
34So what are the authorities doing about it now?
35I don't know.
36I did read that they're aiming to stop disposing of waste water into the ocean over the next ten years.
37But that won't help with flood prevention now, will it?
38No. Really they just need to find the money for something to replace the drainage channels,
39in order to protect against flooding now.
40But in the long term they need to consider the whole ecosystem.
41Right.
42Really, though, coastal cities can't deal with their problems on their own, can they?
43I mean, they've got to start acting together at an international level instead of just doing their own thing.
44Absolutely.
45The thing is, everyone knows what the problems are
46and environmentalists have a pretty good idea of what we should be doing about them,
47so they should be able to work together to some extent.
48But it's going to be a long time before countries come to a decision on what principles they're prepared to abide by.
49Yeah, if they ever do.
50So I think we've probably got enough for our presentation.
51It's only fifteen minutes.
52OK.
53So I suppose we'll begin with some general historical background
54about why coastal cities were established.
55But we don't want to spend too long on that,
56the other students will already know a bit about it.
57It's all to do with communications and so on.
58Yes.
59We should mention some geographical factors,
60things like wetlands and river estuaries and coastal erosion and so on.
61We could have some maps of different cities with these features marked.
62On a handout you mean?
63Or some slides everyone can see?
64Yeah, that'd be better.
65It'd be good to go into past mistakes in a bit more detail.
66Did you read that case study of the problems there were in New Orleans with flooding a few years ago?
67Yes, We could use that as the basis for that part of the talk.
68I don't think the other students will have read it,
69but they'll remember hearing about the flooding at the time.
70OK.
71So that's probably enough background.
72So then we'll go on to talk about what action's being taken to deal with the problems of coastal cities.
73OK.
74What else do we need to talk about?
75Maybe something on future risks, looking more at the long term, if populations continue to grow.
76Yeah.
77We'll need to do a bit of work there,
78I haven't got much information, have you?
79No. We'll need to look at some websites.
80Shouldn't take too long.
81OK.
82And I think we should end by talking about international implications.
83Maybe we could ask people in the audience.
84We've got people from quite a lot of different places.
85That'd be interesting, if we have time, yes.
86So now...