Sequestering seawater on land: a water-based solution to global

The ‘surplus’ of oceanic water generated by climate change offers an unprecedented opportunity to tackle a number of global issues through a very pragmatic process: shifting the excess water from the oceans onto the land. Here we propose that sea-level rise could be mitigated through the desalination of very large amounts of seawater in massive desalination plants. To efficiently mitigate sea-level rise, desalinized water could be stored on land in the form of crop, wetlands or new forests. Based on a US$ 500 million price to build an individual mega desalination plant with current technology, the cost of controlling current sea-level rise through water desalination approaches US$ 23 trillion. However, the economic, environmental and health benefits would also be immense and could contribute to addressing a number of global issues including sea-level rise, food security, biodiversity loss and climate change. Because these issues are intimately intertwined, responses should aim at addressing them all concurrently and at global scale. Stéphane Boyer ( ) Corresponding author: [email protected] Boyer S and Lefort MC. How to cite this article: Sequestering seawater on land: a water-based solution to global issues [version 1; 2016, :889 (doi: ) referees: 1 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] F1000Research 5 10.12688/f1000research.8739.1 © 2016 Boyer S and Lefort MC. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Copyright: Creative Commons Attribution , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Licence The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work. Grant information: Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed. 13 May 2016, :889 (doi: ) First published: 5 10.12688/f1000research.8739.1 1,2