‘I fear we’ll have the Thames lined with derelict towers’, warns former City planning chief

One of Hong Kong's big property mavens is touting a plan to build a whole new city in Ireland, to home around 50,000 emigrants from his semi-autonomous Chinese hometown.

"Urban areas have been creating flood risk," writes Lee Bosher. "And this is largely due to the government’s focus on making land – low cost, flood prone land – available for development."

'In some cases, the scale of flooding or coastal change may be so significant [that it] may mean potentially moving communities out of harm’s way in the longer term'