Therefore, what is land reclamation? Land reclamation commonly refers to creating dry land from an area covered with lets say water.
The next question is that why do people want to carry out land reclamation. Firstly, land may be damaged to natural hazards such as tsunamis or fires. Furthermore, human activities can do lots of damages to the land or environment through poor farming methods leading to cases of waterlogged land like swamps and marshes. Last but not least there may be a problem of land scarcity where it may be difficult for a country to find new lands.
Land reclamation increases the availability of arable land at the same time, expanding the carrying capacity of land. Thus it is a very feasible solution for countries for the problem overcrowding. Furthermore it allows further growth of a country's industries or a multitude of purposes.
There are two types of land reclamation. One is the landfill method and the other is the empoldering method. However I will be touching more on empoldering as it is a more relatively unknown method than the landfill one.
Empoldering refers to the creation of polders, which are pieces of land in a low lying area reclaimed from a body of water by building dikes and through drainage. They are usually carried out in low-lying coastal areas, and it can also apply to areas that are further inland like lakes.
So what are the stages of doing empolderment? Firstly a dike is built surrounding the targeted reclamation land. Later, dikes and construction pikes are used to retrieve all the water from the land. Next when the land has dried reeds are being sown by an aircraft and after three years, the reeds are being burned and the fertile ash is used to make the soil arable something like the slash and burn method. Finally, crops can be cultivated on that piece of reclaimed land on buildings can be built on it.
All in all, I feel that land reclamation is a very important method for small countries like Netherlands or Singapore as they can use their newly reclaimed land to expand their industries and earn profits.
