As politicians bicker over efforts to stop rising sea levels, architects are already making contingency plans.
New York architect Kai-Uwe Bergmann of Bjarke Ingels Group says there's no rule we have to build homes on the land.
"If you're building on the water, you're able to rise with the rising waters," he told The AM Show on Monday.
He says for about NZ$80,000, floating homes made of shipping containers can be built in harbours around the world.
"It actually floats, so it has a ballast. There's a concrete base that's sitting below the water surface. If you think of an iceberg, the solid part of it is underneath, providing that stability. It actually rises with any kind of water event."
Homes near the ocean at the present sea level face being waterlogged in the next 100 years. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects a rise of about 65cm by the end of this century. Recent research has suggested that could be a conservative guess, with ice sheets melting faster and faster as the world warms.
"It's not the answer to everything - what we're looking for are creating multiple answers and creating multiple types of housing so we don't only have a single way of doing things," said Mr Bergmann.
"This is a way of futureproofing housing in many cities."
The architect says at present, there's too much focus on building expensive structures that last 50-100 years, but will be uninhabitable if they're underwater.
"We should look also at temporal, shorter-term ways of building homes that may last 20, 30 years, then you can actually build them for one-third of the cost in half the time... In terms of the cost for a three-bedroom, I would put that somewhere around US$40,000 to US$50,000."
If you think it can't be done, or could lead to a post-apocalyptic Waterworld type of community, Mr Bergmann says they've already begun construction in Copenhagen - where they're being used as cheap accommodation for students.
"Everyone needs to work together on this - the public agencies, the permitting agencies, the banks and the insurers. As soon as you start creating new types of housing, it sort of gets into a morass. What you see in Copenhagen, where we've started this project, is all of those components are working together to solve the housing crisis."
An entire floating city is planned for French Polynesia. Tech billionaire Peter Theil, a New Zealand citizen, is one of its backers - hoping to set up a community that will "liberate humanity from politicians". It's unclear whether construction will go ahead though, with local opposition to the ambitious project.
At the weekend, scientists suggested an even more ambitious construction project aimed at stopping sea level rises, not adapting to them - building huge walls to hold in Antarctic ice.
Newshub.
