$6 billion can go a long ways. It can pay for 25,000 students to attend Harvard, finance one month of the war in Iraq, and even re-build the World Trade Center with plenty left over to spare. But it might not be enough to save one of the most renowned cities in the world from despair.

It is no mystery that the 1,300-year-old island city of Venice is slowly sinking while the sea level is rising.  It’s known as “aqua alta” — high water — and it brings city life to a standstill for several hours. Big boats can’t go under low-hanging bridges, and water seeps into buildings through the sewage system. Venetians have not lived on the ground floor for decades.

So what can be done to remedy this fateful situation? Venetians are resorting to sophisticated technology to fight this full-scale emergency. The project is called MOSE, for short, which is also the Italian acronym for Moses, recalling the biblical parting of the sea.

Once completed in 2014, there will be 78 large, mobile flood gates at the three inlets. When not in use, they will sit on the lagoon bed. When a high tide is forecast, the gates will rise and shut off the sea from the lagoon.

But there is no time to waste, as the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — has forecast a sea level rise by the end of this century of between 18 and 59 centimeters.

Read more from NPR.