Brackish Waters: Integrating Justice in Climate Adaptation and Long-Term Water Management

Brackish waters can be found in transition zones between freshwater rivers and saltier seas. These dynamic coastal landscapes harbor multiple functions such as housing, agriculture, nature, and industry. Because of climate change, existing borders between fresh and saline water - and between land and water - are becoming contested. Extreme...

Water as a coolant of cities

Since more than half of the world population already lives in cities, it is important to understand the urban climate and its particularities. One of the typical aspects of urban areas is that cities are generally warmer than their rural surrounding. This phenomenon was first time described 200 years ago in the case of London and is commonly...

Hydrosystems as Multipractice Phenomena: A Normative Approach to Analysing Governance System Failures

Given the water governance regime, how potent is the normative practice idea in the case of hydrosystems management? How can the normative practice framework explain the failure of the water governance of the Zayandehrud, and how can this explanation improve water governance both in thsi case and more generally?<br/>Can the govervance of the...

Nested algorithms for optimal reservoir operation and their embedding in a decision support platform

Reservoir operation is a multi-objective optimization problem traditionally solved with dynamic programming (DP) and stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) algorithms. The thesis presents novel algorithms for optimal reservoir operation named nested DP (nDP), nested SDP (nSDP), nested reinforcement learning (nRL) and their multi-objective (MO)...

Hybrid membrane system for desalination and wastewater treatment: Integrating forward osmosis and low pressure reverse osmosis

Since more than 97% of the water in the world is seawater, desalination technologies have the potential to solve the fresh water crisis. The most used desalination technology nowadays is seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO), where a membrane is used as a physical barrier to separate the salts from the water, using high hydraulic pressure as the...

The tradition of making: Polder cities

Climate change brings larger and more frequent rainstorms and Dutch cities are confronted with water nuisance. The urban water systems are unable to deal with this change in the hydrological cycle in spite of the fact that the Dutch are dealing with this condition for centuries. The question is: What is the tradition of building in wet and soft...

Present & Future: Visualising ideas of water infrastructure design

In redevelopment and redesign of small water structures local water governing institutions are increasingly required to and requesting that the planning processes are set up in a participatory manner. Participatory decision making processes are set up to bring stakeholders with different backgrounds, ideas, experiences and expertise together....

Bridging Boundaries: Making scale choices in multi-actor policy analysis on water management

This thesis synthesizes different perspectives on scale choices (spatial boundary setting, temporal boundary setting and the selection of the level of aggregation) in policy analysis. Scale choices influence the content of a study: the problems on the agenda, the options found and the impacts addressed. This also affects the process, because...

Map making and map use in a multi-actor context: Spatial visualizations and frame conflicts in regional policymaking in the Netherlands

In this thesis, the practice of map-making and map use is studied among actors involved in spatial planning and water management. The socio-technical mechanisms between knowlegde production and policymaking in Dutch regional planning make up the central object of study, with map images as observable artefacts. In many instances, maps seem to be...

Actor analysis for water resources management: Putting the promise into practice

Water related problems such as floods, droughts, declining groundwater tables or polluted rivers have a major impact on numerous societies throughout the world. Despite these serious problems, policy makers seem to make scant use of the knowledge that is available with water experts. Conversely, water experts face the task of finding out how...

Dynamic Water-System Control - Design and Operation of Regional Water-Resources Systems

A pattern directed approach towards an object adaptive decision support environment for water resources management

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