Thirteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

This paper explores a new focus to mitigate climate change, shifting from efforts to reduce emissions or control industries, to efforts that reuse the by-products caused by climate change itself, returning all of them to the environment in cooperative ways that restore the natural balance while creating new productive activities. Thus, the paper provides a theoretical analysis of a system based on implanting a significant amount of stations in coastal areas around the world that collectively would recover the fresh water that is lost annually from the polar caps and glaciers for human uses like crop irrigation, controlling sea level rise, absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere, reforesting coastal areas, and creating jobs. The analysis is based on partial computational simulations of the most important stages of each station: pumping water with ocean-wave power and water evaporation through solar power. The paper is structured in three parts: a description of the system with its objectives, simulations, and characteristics; a review of the literature concerning solar and wave power desalinization in large and small-scale around the world; and conclusions. Indicating that a project with this scope is physically feasible; a physical scale model and a real prototype of a station are needed to see the physical process integrated; more computational capacity is needed to perform the simulation of the entire system, the best places (sun radiation, wave strength, density) to implant each station needs to be determined, as well as their integration with landscape.